


Ocean Thousand, Mountain Thousand

by unreadlibrary



Category: Samurai Champloo
Genre: 1980s AU mixed in there, F/M, Friendship, Okinawan Shtuff, One Shot Collection, Post-Series, Pre-Series, Romance, canon typical violence and language and innuendo, mid-series, now there's a Porco Rosso inspired AU what the hay, ongoing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 03:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 30,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16526339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unreadlibrary/pseuds/unreadlibrary
Summary: A collection of Samurai Champloo oneshots, most probably all of them Fuugen.Title comes from the Japanese proverb, "Ocean Thousand, Mountain Thousand." Swam in a thousand oceans, climbed a thousand mountains: meaning one who has been there, done that, and seen it all.





	1. The Word For It Doesn't Exist

**Author's Note:**

> So, there's a pattern here, see....
> 
> You can break each section into four groups of six:  
> 1\. Traditional pre/mid/post series one-shot  
> 2\. Traditional pre/mid/post series one-shot  
> 3\. Flash fiction  
> 4\. Okinawan lore themed  
> 5\. AU  
> 6\. Seasonal story
> 
> So feel free to poke around as you wish. The Okinawan-themed stories and seasonal stories can be read as subsequent or stand-alone. Cheers!

If Mugen had a type, he’d have lied about it.

You don’t let anybody know they’ve got something over you. Throw out something nice and inconsequential like big breasts—sure, who wouldn’t admire something rare and sumptuous? But bread-and-butter, the stuff that makes you feel at home? Or worse, like you finally found home? Keep that to yourself.

Something about a woman putting her hair up. That itself wasn’t a rare thing, but watching the strands come loose—that was something else. That part didn’t necessarily link Sara and Fuu in Mugen’s mind, but it was something he secretly took note of between the two of them. Then there was the small of a woman’s back—there were grades, you see, and Sara was Grade AAA. This is where the similarities between her and Fuu really began. It was the one thing about Fuu that was altogether there. Mugen caught the two of them walking side-by-side and back then he’d been struck by that thought that haunted him now. Sara wasn’t anything but the word beautiful—because she had grown into her beauty. And when Fuu turned her head just then, all childish expression and complaint, Mugen’s brain did a trick and mashed her and Sara together and it suddenly made sense. Sara was a woman. Fuu was just a kid. But Fuu was going to surpass Sara one day.

Of course that train of thought got squashed quickly. Got squashed altogether after the memory of Sara got associated with too many uncovered things. What Sara had said that night, and what Fuu had disputed. The quality of warmth that Mugen felt long after Fuu’s body had ceased to envelope his; the differences in that quality as opposed to the mind-numbing faceless full-bodied gulp of sex he could ill-afford.

(Fuu, for her part, cherished the memory of his rapid heartbeat pulsing against her throat).

 

The day Fuu surpassed Sara, she guessed she was around twenty-two-years-old. She counted another birthday every time the sunflowers bloomed. Seven autumns had passed between Fuu’s childhood and her place now, standing in front of her friend she had never called long-lost—because she had never lost him.

Here was the man who had been there at the beginning of all of Fuu’s deliberate choices; she wanted to show him the other choices she had made; she wanted to know what he had made of himself. And there he was—thinking a thought he’d had a long time ago, and perhaps just now realizing the reason the thought had stuck with him.

It happened in a moment close to dusk, after a conversation that said more with silence than with good ol’ days talk. A week after their reunion with his rough hand on the bone of her jaw, on the skin so soft it surprised him and caused her to grab his wrist to steady it. She was the only woman that, when she first entered his mind—in a memory, in a dream, in a fit of rage or concern or annoyance or desire or, rarer for him, contentment—he did not undress her. The thought had crossed his mind dozens of times, but it’s like she slowly broke down the habit and came to him as something else.

He tried to kiss her roughly, like a pirate, like a paying customer, like he didn’t care. But there she was, kissing him back, and he realized it was her first kiss and she’d been waiting for him and he’d been waiting for her. This was some messed up universe, if of all people he was the one that got love mixed into all this. It was the 18th century for crying out loud. The word love, or romance, or sentimental, or— it probably didn’t even exist. Some woman-made notion; an artistic whim; a fairy tale. Mugen had never expected anything close to it his whole life—so in each subsequent kiss there was his regret and exasperation. She was the one getting the short end of the stick. So when she reached up to steady his hand again, to hold it, and whispered in his ear a shy invitation, he stiffened. She took a ragged breath.

“Why?” she asked.

This was something vulnerable she was offering, that’s all Mugen knew. He wanted to take it, that wasn’t a question. But he was the experienced one here; the result would be reduction. He’d take up her offer and that’s all either of them would get.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m not normally like this—I’m not—I wouldn’t—”

She laughed sadly, “Look, it’s not like you’re gonna marry anybody, least of all me. But—”

She took a few steps away from him, the warmth already fading. She placed her hands on her hips and paced.

“—but I got carried away. You are—you’ve always been different to me, for me,”

She was still trying to love him—she was doing a better job at explaining it than he could. He shouldn’t have come back. He shouldn’t have put the clues together. He should have just imagined who she’d become—some chick who’d get hitched and then would pop out a couple kids and that would have been enough. But no, he’d wanted to know. Truth be told, he’d wanted to show off too. Show her his unpatched clothes, the condition he’d kept her father’s sword in, the money he made. Who knows, maybe she’d think he was a man. The good kind. Shit, like Jin.

He wasn’t satisfied; he wanted more; he could be more.

“Who says?” he retorted. Fuu turned her head, that same old contorted expression but no longer childish, and stopped pacing. Both, unconsciously, softened their breathing.

She stepped near him—always making the first move. Exactly Mugen’s type.

"Who says I wouldn't marry you?" he continued, probably the boldest thing he'd ever said.

“You’re certain?” she smiled impishly—not at him, at his hands, in which she traced his and her agony, that hope that both of them could be less-than-stubborn-enough to agree to this one thing.

Even if he’d die before admitting it, his secret was this: everything had a certain _sheen_ to it, now that Fuu had pointed it out. Like she’d made the ocean something more than drudgery and transport, the day she had danced in it. Like how she still sat at every campfire he ever made—her and Jin both—and made that something more-than too. She was also, maybe, probably, very possibly, the reason he had realized Sara was beautiful at all.

Fuu continued, “Mugen, you’re talking about keeping your promises again. But for a very, very long time,”

She did look at him now, at first her gaze at the side of his face, then to his eyes, but her voice had already pierced him. He liked that feeling. He was a masochist like that.

“Yeah, well, so are you,” he said.

She grinned then and, leaning upwards to whisper in his ear, said, “I told you I’d be a babe some day,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editor from the future: took out some of the sappier lines. I'm really not the best judge of what's sentimental or not, but I do tend to think people mistake sincerity for sentimentality. I just can't for the life of me see anybody as completely heartless, and I guess that's why I write Fuugen. Still, I got rid of the lines that never sat right with me and am now slightly appeased.


	2. Pretty Girls

Mugen fell in love once, accidentally, sloppily.

Love had something to do with tenderness. Mugen was not tender. It had something to do with commitment. Mugen did not commit. And Mugen was pretty sure he was Buddhist in one regard: romantic love wasn’t substantial, shouldn’t even be defined.

She enters roughly and leaves roughly. Like a dagger. Like a hook. As far as partings go, they’d had several. By the time they separated at a crossroads he’d gotten used to it. It wasn’t the worst way he’d seen someone go.

Finding her again, with years between them, all on the whim of a nightmare, seemed appropriate. Her eyes had narrowed and softened and deepened. Her hair was longer and the way she wore it more ornate. Shock and satisfaction had rushed through him and made him realize one thing: he’d been on the road too long. And he reeked.

She was rich as all get out. He’d soaked in her estate’s baths and flirted half-heartedly with the maids, who blushed and giggled and acquiesced. In the end he just took the food they brought and slept off the effect of the road. But couldn’t completely slough it off. So he got up in the middle of the night and was roaming the estate when he came across her in the garden. Her mourning clothes were all done up in moonlight; the husband had died the year before. Her hair was down and he’d never wanted to get lost in something so badly.

She looked like she knew something he didn’t. He was used to her doe-eyed unknowing, and, though she never saw him, he felt like she was looking right through him at that moment.

When he did crawl back to sleep he had the same nightmare he’d been having for months now. It used to always be that he died in that one. The sight of her crushed by an inescapable ring of black bloody feathers was enough to make him wake up in a sweat.

So, yes, he accepted the first hare-brained scheme she gave him. And yes, he wanted to strangle her when she offered him money.

 _I’m a man, dammit._ Hard, rough, and very unready. Not a bit rich. At some point he’d contemplated a word he’d put out of his vocabulary altogether. Did he betray it in his hands instead? Or the way he refused to look at her? For those few short months, his entire body was shouting— _never, never, never_ and _please, please, please_.

He hadn’t realized till then he’d been in love since he was nineteen-years-old.

Oh hell, what of it? What did the world expect?

She was a pretty girl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got a couple okayish Fuugen one-shots that I can't bring myself to make more than they are--but this one is just slightly more than okay in my opinion. 
> 
> This and some other ones are inspired by The Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden."


	3. No Sleep in My Body

Sometimes his mind woke up before his body. Mugen would lie more often than not on the salty earth and feel himself thrashing, thrashing, but the signal didn't get down to his limbs. No matter the force of his will, he couldn't lift a finger. Forced vulnerability. Almost a childlike terror. 

It reminded him too much of home. You learned to sleep lightly at home: light, and tight, and curled around anything you treasured. It had been worse with the girl--never knowing when her unlucky orbit would pull in some nut job with a dagger. 

Without her, it was impossible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gave myself a 100 Word Challenge and took the title from Frank Ocean's "Nights." (I really like to pillage that song).


	4. Niruya Kanaya

Mugen grew up knowing that happiness existed, and it existed on a far-away island to the east. They called it Niruya Kanaya—the Root of Everything.

When Mugen was eleven-years-old and had just been beaten out of his own shirt, he decided he would sail to the place where happiness was brought from. He’d had only a glimpse of what the holy women did (before the holy women were made unholy by the Boss Man). But they and their big fans and their secret rituals told him little, other than the fact that only chaste women were allowed to have anything to do with the place. Mugen understood that part, at least; he was a dirty little boy, so mean and ugly he’d been cut from his mother’s cord with her own teeth. Well, that’s what Mukuro told him anyway.

“You so eager to get there?” heckled one of the Boss Men (there was always two or three, each ganging up against the other), “Get sloppy with that dagger again and you’ll wind up there sideways and with my ghost after your ass for all of time, you hear?”

(This particular incident happened when Mugen was twelve-years-old, his crappy little boat to Niruya Kanaya finished, and he had just attempted to slit the throat of the Boss Man who watched over his particular cluster of misfit throwaways. He didn’t succeed—but he wasn’t killed either. Boss Man liked his resolve; he put the boy to good use).

Mugen had a spectacular aversion to dying. When he heard about honorable deaths and heart attacks and lovers’ suicides, he never understood the appeal. He preferred the drama of blood still pumping in your chest, or a full belly, or, dunno, just doing something badass.

Mugen was sixteen before he sailed the boat. The four years of nothing—of piracy and what little remained of his gentleness-didn’t dampen his resolve. Nobody would have ever guessed somebody like Mugen could be _faithful_. It was that he either still believed in a happy place or he still believed in his crappy boat.

If Mugen had a hobby, (besides: booze, ogling, picking up dirty tricks at brawls, staring at the ocean, and cobbling together ever-more-lethal shoes), you might have guessed he liked to carve wood. He not only liked making shapes out of it, he liked making useful shapes. A sturdier halyard, a more user-friendly rudder. He understood the space and function of things by instinct. Helped in the gang fights growing up—the right space to hide in, the right place to jump out from, the exact place a man needed to be kicked in so he’d keel over, etc. And it helped in building a boat that could take him far, far away from the pissing pot he’d been born in.

It was the storm that almost killed Mugen for the upteenth time. He had a few too many close encounters, but it was this particular storm that brought him the 400 miles or so from the islands of Ryukyu. He awoke with sand in his mouth and the difficulty of opening his eyes for all the salt that crusted them. Lifting himself, he shook the sand from his wild hair and got a good sniff of paradise.

He sat there a while, kneeling like some counterfeit samurai with his hands on his knees; uncharacteristically still. Waited, tensely, for happiness.

What was it supposed to be, exactly? People had told him it’s when you don’t feel like crying, ever. But Mugen didn’t cry anyway. People had also told him it’s when you have a full stomach, and a place to sleep. The Boss Men had those, and they were probably the most miserable S.O.B.’s Mugen could think of. Well, what about beautiful things? Gold, women, silk jammies, some flowers even a child could trample? Gold had to spent; women had to be spent; and all that other crud was for people with too much time on their hands and too little jazz down below. Not Mugen—his hands alone were coarser than this sorry excuse for a beach and he’d challenge any old boss to a contest in manhood.

Huh. Mugen didn’t think you were supposed to get annoyed in heaven.

His eyes were still closed; at first too painful to open, now too reluctant. Smell of the ocean familiar, if a little different. There was slight hope in that. Warmth.

A circle of arms surrounded him. Mugen, startled but no longer annoyed. He’d let his guard down. What was this then? His answer? Was this happiness? Whose arms were these? His mother’s? One of the holy women’s? A lover’s? They were so soft.

This illusion lasted for two seconds. Mugen opened his eyes in time to see a toothless old man with soggy wrinkled arms trying to put him in a choke hold. Bastard was nearly blind and just as feeble and hadn’t gotten anywhere close. Mugen threw him off with more violence than was necessary, something that would become a habit, and fled the scene. He nearly tripped on the splinters of his crappy little childhood boat.

Well, he hadn’t gotten to the Root of Everything, but he had graduated from the Bronze Pissing Pot to the Silver.

Mugen had made it to the Land of the Rising Sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally wrote this short simply based on Nirai-Kanai, or Niruya Kanaya, depends on what part of Okinawa you’re hailing from. (I’ve got in in my mind to write several shorts about Okinawan mythology, or even just phrases, so here’s me wading me feet in). Then a song clicked on, one I had squirreled away in a playlist I really just think of as my Fuugen playlist. And what should come up as I finish this story than Ryan Caraveo’s “Paradise”? Well, if you want a listen, it fits this story in a strangely satisfying way. 
> 
> [Also can we talk about how Post Malone just dropped a single called “Sunflower” that fits this ship to a T??? - Expect a short inspired by this one shortly].
> 
> Any weirdness in style and typos are mine, of course, but I still want to partially blame them on my Nanowrimo ambitions and a case of foggy brain. (So, this is subject to needed editing in the future). My goal is just to finish 30 “somethings” for this Nano. Could be multi-chap stuff, one-shots, 100 word drabbles, stuff that maybe isn’t fanfiction too, haha. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Sources on the mythology and how I even found it’s sorta-kinda shown in the show: 
> 
> 1\. http://www.spookhouse.net/angelynx/comics/characters.html   
> 2\. https://japanesemythology.wordpress.com/nirai-kanai/  
> 3\. https://japanesemythology.wordpress.com/nirai-kanai-the-okinawan-belief-of-paradise-and-a-god-of-niraikanai/


	5. Sweet Release (1989)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1989 AU.

_I was born on a side road far from here_  
_While the town was burning out my dark window_  
_I was crowned with a cage of cold barbed wire_

* * *

 Something changed, that day in Shimo Kitazawa, with blood running down his leg and the other guy with blood everywhere. It was raining, washing away the effects if not the causes. After the brawl, Mugen cleaned his sword with an oily rag and the increasing downpour. Jin was looking at him; glasses all fogged up in the rain. _Jackass_ , Mugen thought.

If Jin had been the one to find her, sitting there in the rain under a poor excuse for a poncho, he might have done something like let Fuu cry on his shoulder. As it was, Mugen found her sitting in an alley between a conbini and a used clothing store, both with closed signs hastily enforced. Mugen hovered over Fuu a moment, but he didn’t have the energy--he didn’t really have the desire to lord something over her, tell her to suck it up. Mugen sat down because, well, he was tired too.

Was he letting her hold his hand, or was it the other way around? She didn’t say anything as she slipped hers into his. Mugen caught a glimpse of her face, resolute, not even crying anymore. Hard to tell with it raining, but her eyes weren’t nearly so red, so that was his interpretation.

She had coppery stains on her pantlegs, but she was holding the hand that had started the whole mess. Mugen might have figured this was the first time she had seen somebody die, but back at the beginning she told them how she had nobody in this world. Mom died in hospice and he figured her dad was another story. Whoever this sunflower guy was might just end up another count in the body bag by the end of this road trip. Still, it was 1989. Yakuza or whoever else still did things dramatic like kill punks with swords usually did things quietly, or with guns. With efficiency--some might even say dignity.

Mugen? Growing up, they used to call him a butcher, and not just because he was a drunk-excuse-for-a-poultry-butcher’s son.

Yet here she was holding his hand. So this is who he was now. He was somebody that she could hold hands with. Too many ways to interpret that. What was he, her boyfriend? Her keeper? Some older brother figure? Mugen hadn’t been born to be any of those things.

He didn’t wrench his hand away with any force, but there was a sense of finality to it.

“Alright, you good now?” he asked her, just loud enough she could hear him over the rain. Fuu nodded.

Then, “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You’re not...shaken up?”

“Nah.”

“Is that a good thing?”

Jin approached them; seemed he had spent that time procuring umbrellas. He held them out to Fuu and Mugen, saving Mugen from having to answer. But Mugen didn’t like the idea of being saved by Jin, so he ignored the offer and stood up, ready to lord it over everyone.

“Yeah it’s a good thing, ya freakin’ mouse!” he spread his arms for emphasis, “That’s why you hand-picked us, right? We can do your dirty work. We can keep ya safe and sound and innocent. What you cryin’ for? You got a drop of blood on your clothes--I live for that stuff, girly. You feel alive now? Here’s the real world--everyone’s either out for ass or throat, and don’t forget it. We saved your skinny little Nadeshiko act from getting both of those taken out from under you, but I’m starting to wonder--what’s in it for us, huh?”

Jin elbowed him--hard.

“Jackass,” Jin hissed.

Fuu stood up, eyes red not from crying but from righteous indignation.

“You’re better than that, Mugen,” she said, which stunned him. But she wasn’t done.

“You talk about these guys like you know them, inside out. Maybe they used to be your crowd, I dunno. What I do know is that you stopped them. Maybe you did it for me. Maybe you did it for you. I don’t care--we’re safe. But you may understand those guys a smidge, Mugen. But don’t pretend you understand me. We’ve known each other for maybe six weeks--don’t get cute,”

Mugen would have traded humiliation for humiliation if he wasn’t still thinking about the first words she’d said to him. He stood there, as Fuu walked past him, opening up the umbrella she’d taken from Jin. Mugen then grabbed his angrily and popped it open; it was one of those free umbrellas with Tokyo ads plastered all over them. This kinda deflated him.

Strange feeling, standing under a canopy when he was already soaked. It’s kinda how he felt being in this mismatched trio. Pretending like the world hadn’t already gotten to him. Like he could hold hands with a girl who still shook at the sight of blood, at the thought of even a screw-up going to meet his just rewards.

_You’re better than that, Mugen._

“Doubt it,” he muttered, but then Fuu turned around. She looked at Jin first; Mugen scowled; but then almost immediately she looked at him. She smiled faintly, arched an eyebrow. _Coming?_

_*  
_

Rain kept falling all that day and the next, and sporadically through the weeks, till the six weeks had turned into ten and the ten into twelve, and it seemed like they had known each other all their lives but not at all. Takes a whole life to know somebody, and even by then they’ve changed once or twice.

And sometimes you get years of being nothing and doing nothing good, and just like that two minutes can change you. Even a change in degree can alter your entire life’s destination; Mugen’s orbit adjusted accordingly.

And sometimes you get a type of rain that can drain cause and effect, and a girl who looks at you like this is a movie and the casting and the location and the soundtrack of your life actually matters. It's all a sweet release. 

\--

 

 _It will whisper, it will stir a gentle breeze, its hands are your hands_  
_They will take you where you please, if you please_  
_Will you choose to be gentle? It's just your life whatever you feel_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just had to reference my favorite ward in Tokyo: Shimo Kitazawa--the land of coffee and used clothing stores. <3
> 
> Lyrics are taken from Boz Scaggs' "Sweet Release," a song I will definitely be revisiting. Songs: Ohia was the band that introduced me to the song; both are great versions. Tonally, this song also fits another one of Watanabe's creations--but then again, Spike and Mugen are kinda the same coin at the end of the day.  
> \--  
> This may appear in another work of mine; I've got a mind to create a 1989 AU version of the events in the series. So, stay tuned! And thanks for reading.


	6. Sunflower Wine (Autumn)

—  
_When dawn breaks again_  
_we'll say our farewells_  
_Our dreams become distant apparitions_  
—

 **Autumn.**  
—

  
Fuu had her first true drink at a dock in a town at the brink of the ocean, a town exposed to all sides by wind.

There had been such a lot of grace, since Fuu had lost and found her father all over again. Grief left a wonderful opening like that—not a wound anyone takes willingly, but a clean cut none-the-less. On either side of her, Fuu’s old friends nursed their bottles of foreign beer, which tasted all the better for being smuggled.

“Blegh,” Fuu had laughed while making a face like she was about to sneeze, “This stuff tastes like _bread_ ,”

“My farts _smell_ like bread,” burped Mugen.

“Nn,” said Jin, non-committal. Fuu and Mugen laughed at him, though Mugen’s was more a guffaw, truly at Jin’s expense. Fuu gave Jin a pat on the shoulder as consolation.

“Thanks for getting this, Jin,” she said, bravely taking a second sip, “Nobody should have their first drink alone,”

“Is that a thing?” Mugen asked. He propped his knee up so he could dangle his arm over it, swirling the bottle around.

“Should be,” said Fuu. There was a pause in which the three of them managed to each take a sip simultaneously.

“What about you guys?” Fuu asked, “When was your first time?”

Mugen grinned wickedly, but then Fuu had anticipated this. She pinched his ear—playfully. Had she been younger, she might have actually meant the tug she gave him for almost telling a dirty joke, but really that was all that was there in her touch—something playful. Fuu and Mugen both knew it was also kinda flirty, but Mugen just scowled again, which was how he liked to express most of his emotions.

Jin cleared his throat, “After my first practice duel,”

“Oh, yeah?” Fuu turned towards him, encouraging.

“Yeah,” Jin said, and now he stared at his bottle in thought, the color reminding him of the days-old bruises from nearly a decade ago, “He kicked the shit out of me,”

Jin said this last line in a perfectly Jin way, not betraying himself by a single tonal shift. Fuu blinked in admiration at his composure. It still floored her.

“Takes the edge off,” Mugen said to Fuu, as if she needed an explanation. He made to throw his empty bottle into the ocean but thought better about it and set it aside, popping open another on the underside of the dock. He felt Fuu’s eyes on him.

“What?” he said, yawning lazily.

“When did you get your first drink?”

Mugen scratched his crotch in thought. At length he said he didn’t know; he’d blacked out at the time.

“But I was probably…about your height,” he said. It was a strange fact. Fuu remembered that Mugen wasn’t exactly sure how old he was. How would he know how old he was then?

The sun was climbing down real slow, blood-orange.

“Can’t say I like it very much,” Fuu scrunched her face up, even as she drank the last of the bottle away in one long gulp, “But—maybe I finally feel a buzz?”

Her companions were silent. Fuu didn’t mistake this. It was a companionable silence.

The pop of Jin’s second bottle; he offered Fuu hers.

“Let’s play the Never game,” she said.

The other two groaned.

“Come on killjoys, at least let me explain the rules,” Fuu smirked and held her palms up in superior supplication.

“How many beers we got left, Jin?” Mugen asked.

“Enough,” said Jin.

“Aight,” Mugen said, and that was all the permission Fuu needed.

“So then,” she said, “We take turns. We each say something we’ve never done—but whichever one of us has done it, we take a sip,”

“Of course you’d pick this game,” said Mugen, “You can’t lose ‘cause you haven’t done anything,”

Fuu gave him a cold, clean look that told him she would not rise to his bait—just yet.

“Well, fine, let me go first,” she said breezily, “As a warm-up,”

She put her finger to her bottom lip, cracked with four or five winters’ worth of time and exposure. Since their reunion, Jin had noticed other changes: the now sweeping cascade of her hair, done up with a new bobby pin that must have cost her a month’s wages, and the cerise kimono she wore, the new length of her calf.

Mugen had noticed other things.

“Um,” said Fuu, “Ok, here’s one: I’ve never stabbed a guy in the foot before,”

“The hell?” Mugen spat, “That’s—uh, what’s the word?”

“Awfully specific,” Jin provided.

“Yeah! Awfullyspecific,”

Fuu looked between the two of them with an expectant expression. She waited. Jin and Mugen exchanged glances, then each took a sip.

“Alright, Jin, you’re next,” said Fuu, pleased with herself.

But Jin took so long making up his mind that Mugen and Fuu both lent forward to get a good look at him.

Jin came up with: “I’ve never gone swimming,”

Immediately Fuu and Mugen wracked their brains for any memory of Jin having swum at any length and they both called him out for his fishing incident.

“That wasn’t swimming,” Jin explained calmly, “I dove in, I grabbed the fish, I came out. The water wasn’t even that deep,”

Even so, Fuu scowled and took a sip and Mugen chugged his, causing Fuu to pound him on the back when he choked a little.

“A sip, you idiot, not half the bottle. It’s your turn, by the way,”

“Easy,” Mugen coughed, “I’ve never smelled sunflowers,”

Fuu contested this. Sunflowers do too have a scent! Yeah, what? They smell like—like it’s almost autumn. Mm-nn. Jin’s not convinced either; bottom’s up, girly.

“No fair,” Fuu whined, “Two sips in a row,”

“Since when have we gone easy on ya?” Mugen grinned like a loon, was in a flirty mood himself. Probably just the beer.

At that moment, Fuu clapped her hands together, nearly tipping her bottle’s contents down Mugen’s leg.

“Got it,” Fuu squealed—also an effect of the beer, “I’ve never, uh, de-flower—um, y’know, deflowered…anybody,”

In Fuu’s defense, it had sounded much better in her head. As she said it, her actual modesty kicked in. She blushed a beery blush.

Jin took a swig. But Mugen—Mugen—was late to the punch.

It was Fuu and Jin’s turn to look at him. Mugen finished the other half of the bottle for emphasis.

“What?!” he said, a little too loudly. Overcompensating.

“I knew it,” Jin said. Fuu knew she should laugh but her jaw was still unhinged. She stared at Mugen.

“All of that insufferable talk!” she managed, “You drove me crazy! You thought you were a real john back then, but you’re still a—you’re still—”

Now the good cheer of alcohol got to Fuu. Her head tilted back as she laughed, her expensive bobby pin poking into Jin’s shoulder. He didn’t mind at all, he was too busy trying to hang tough like a samurai but he could only hide his laughter behind his hand.

Mugen chose at that moment to curse in his native tongue; sentiment translated just fine.

“Oh come on, Mugen,” Fuu patted his shoulder in consolation this time, “You know-hee—it’s kinda refreshing-f-ha-ha! You breaking character like that—!”

And she and Jin broke into a fresh peal of half-drunk cackling.

Mugen shot straight up, knocking one of his beer bottles over the edge. The effect was satisfying so he took the next empty one and threw it on the other end of the dock where it crashed and made a sound like a bell cut short. He always had taken a perverse pleasure in glass breaking.

Jin and Fuu stopped laughing.

“Jin, you’re skipped,” Mugen took up a third empty bottle and threw it. That bell sound again.

“I’ve never known how to tuck my kimono-whatever the right way,” he said.

With a conciliatory glance, Fuu and Jin each took a sip.

Another crash. “I’ve never sat for a friggin’ tea party,”

Another. “I’ve never worn my hair up in some queer ponytail or painted my nails or been all kissy in the moonlight or eaten candied plum shit—”

“Mugen,” Fuu huffed, “We haven’t drunk enough beer for you to throw any more bottles away,”

They locked eyes, battling out a silent showdown of wills. Equally matched, they each broke off contact and Mugen walked slowly back to the end of the dock. Jin handed out fresh beers.

“Guys, we don’t have to—” Fuu began, “I just wanted to have a little fun—”

“What are you talking about?” Mugen said, sighing to loosen whatever remaining tension was between them and rolling his right shoulder, “This is—something,”

He clinked his bottle against hers. Fuu looked up at Jin and he gave a sort of half-nod of approval. Then, for a second, the two of them were afraid she was going to burst into tears.

“Don’t go all weepy, dammit,” Mugen said.

“You guys!” Fuu gushed, eyes shiny but no real threat of waterworks to worry about, “You’ve—really grown up!”

“Feh!” Mugen rolled his eyes. Jin whispered that it was getting dark.

“It’s a full moon tonight,” Fuu insisted, holding her beer bottle on her lap in a demure posture she must have picked up somewhere along the way, “And with you two here, what’s there to worry about? —Oh!”

She stood up then, reaching for a jangling purse. “Takoyaki, and um, dumplings. My treat! I’ll be right back,”

A gentle breeze stirred the water. Silently, always silently, the sun set. Splash of a washbasin being thrown out at the end of the day. The air between Jin and Mugen was warm and lived-in; Mugen realized the warmth on his thigh was cooling where the girl had sat. The corner of Jin’s mouth lifted in contentment. Mugen, considerably calmed from before, thought that life was full of surprises.

Nobody had asked about the new and considerably angry scar on Jin’s neck.

Nobody had pointed out that Mugen wasn’t carrying a sword.

Nobody had acknowledged the thin chain tucked amongst the folds of Fuu’s kimono, but both Jin and Mugen saw the small cross glitter in the moonlight when she returned.

Her arms were laden with food (a skill acquired from years of no-nonsense waitressing). After the distribution of squid and azuki mochi and meat buns, Fuu tucked the cross away in one small, deft movement that Mugen replayed over and over in his head.

They ate, interspersed small comments—about the full moon, about the absolute tastiness of it all. When was the last time you boys ate? Worries, comforts, snide remarks. Jin clearing his throat.

“I’ve never gone back to find Shino,” he said. He broke the rules by taking a sip of his own beer. Fuu set down everything to place a comforting hand on Jin’s wrist, which she removed quickly.

“Oh Jin,” she said. Mugen, for his part, felt a knot forming in his forehead.

What was this scene? A full spread, a cute girl, nobody poking a knife in their face—and here was Jin, mucking it up and not even mucking it up in style. Trying to be some classy, stoic ronin caricature. _Screw Jin_. His code of honor and duty and chivalric love and his _being a badass_ was going to go up in smoke just like that? Over some woman he was too much of a coward to commit to?

“You dick,” Mugen said. For once, Fuu didn’t scold Mugen. She just looked down and had the inkling that the boys should do the talking on this one.

“I know,” Jin replied.

“Shi—” Mugen turned his head away from him, looking at something indistinguishable bobbing up and down in the water. Oh wait, the other beer bottle.

“I mean,” Mugen continued, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “What’ stopping you now, huh?”

Jin seemed surprised by this. Fuu turned her head, just slightly, and bit her bottom lip to keep from smiling.

“What’s stopping you now, huh?” Mugen repeated, turning towards them again, “You hear me?”

Jin’s face was unreadable. He closed his eyes. He stood up and passed Mugen his bottle.

“Excuse me,” Jin said, “I’m sorry, I—”

“We know, Jin,” Fuu laughed, her eyes shiny and _definitely_ threatening the waterworks now.

They were all frozen for just a moment, just long enough for the sound of the wind to start and stop again. Some clouds scattered farther along enough that the outline of Ikitsuki Island finally showed itself—a certain beer bottle would end up on its shore by morning.

“I hope we meet again,” said Jin, bowing.

“Cut the crap,” Mugen said, grinning.

“Till next time,” said Fuu. She gave him a small wave, her eyes darker than he remembered. Yes, she really did look older. And Mugen—he was just as Mugen without the sword.

And Jin—he was already halfway down the road.

  
_—_  
_The round autumn moon,_  
_Risen in celebration_  
_—_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics come from the series' own ending song, "Shiki no Uta." I mashed up two popular translations, the main one being on Genius Lyrics. I changed 'phantoms' to 'apparitions,' which is how I see it translated on videos sometimes. Apparitions is vaguer, which I wanted in this instance. 
> 
> It's about time we got some Jin in here. I really love exploring the dynamics between these three. 
> 
> And YES, this is inspired by the Daryl and Beth scene from the earlier Walking Dead seasons. Daryl and Beth and Mugen and Fuu are apparently by go-to OTP bait. The big-brother/bad-boy/May-December thing GAH STOP. 
> 
> But Jin definitely made this so much better than just a Walking Dead rip off. :-)
> 
> Anyhoot, this is one of my headcanons for 4-5 years after the finale. Seems to make the most sense that if they met up anywhere it would be around Ikitsuki Island. They would all know of its personal significance and Fuu may or may not have the inkling to pay respects to her father from time to time. Going back through the series a third time, there's a strong undercurrent of how the seasons affect our lives. Seasonal observations are so thematically Japanese it's almost a cliche--for a show that was about defying the expectations that society or fate forces upon us, the ending felt so tied down to this melancholy idea of seasons changing and partings being inevitable. On the other hand, it doesn't expressly rule out the possibility of reunion or happiness or any of that. Another Japanese cliche: very vague happiness and very vague sadness! Of course I'm not making myself clear--the only way I know how to express it at this time is through fiction. Man, SamCham got me good again. Making me over-analyze and finish my writing and all other sorts of nonsense. <3 Thanks for reading!


	7. No One To Outrun Me

—

 _Against the wooden floor_  
_I threw a silver-glazed cup_  
_Breaking it to pieces._

 _Look, now, the slender curve_  
_Of your sword, half-drawn._

-Basho

  
—

It was August in Uji.

The cash stacked up, thick, badly folded. Mugen straightened out the bills over the table’s edge. His sword clattered on the table.

She waited for his answer.

The window made a second halo around the moon, bright enough in the early morning to light up the room, his shoulders, the blade, even had some left over to angle over and fall at Fuu’s feet. She hadn’t had a chance to wash the blood off yet. She’d never forgotten the smell of blood. Metallic. The whole room, the air, metallic. The blood, the sword, the money. Mugen himself felt sharp and acrid. His shoulders tightened.

_“Keep it.”_

“Mugen,” she said, lifting her hand. They were on opposite sides of the room, his back to her, and he flinched.

“I don’t get women,” he said. He stood, stooping to lift up his blade again. So many of his mannerisms were still defined by a restlessness as-of-yet uncured. He unsheathed the sword and ran his hand along the dull edge. Fuu watched his back intently, a familiar angle. She looked down, all the semblance of a woman bred in a caste he’d never belong to. She found herself studying the blood on the hem of her kimono again. His blood.

She was twenty-three-years-old, and she had not seen Mugen since the day they all had told each other their plans and departed (with the slight hope that one day their lives would make sense together again). Now after all these years Mugen was still in the habit of bleeding from assorted causes _and_ he wouldn’t take her hard-earned, agreed-upon, fair-is-fair cash. She set her jaw again, but her hands pressed together like her mother had trained her to.

“I told you I don’t do this anymore,” Mugen was saying. He sheathed his sword. “I don’t get women,”

“What don’t you get?” Fuu hissed, failing her mother’s memory yet again. She was instantly sorry.

He fastened the sword back around his shoulder and picked up his shoes at the entrance. The shoji slid shut just as Fuu caught up with him. Trailing after, her gut reaction was hesitancy; it conjured up a memory, rather. She felt fifteen all over again and she had hated being fifteen.

A road led to the riverbed from here, an indolent curve with a distant view. Tiers of tea, familiar since her childhood, pulsed from some center that Fuu had never been able to find. It felt as though they were walking right toward it now. Mugen was an endless spiral in this way; always stabbing at the heart of things while keeping his at a distance.

“Where are you going?” Fuu asked. Mugen laughed.

Her voice pitched higher, _“Why are you laughing?”_

Mugen kept his gait steady as Fuu hobbled to catch up to him. Her footsteps were so much louder than his. Chewing on the inside of her cheek, she told herself to be patient, to ask nicely—.

“Why don’t you take the money?” she spat.

Mugen stopped. Walked back while keeping his gaze down on the dirt, as though aimless, but brought his hands out of his pockets. Fuu willed herself to look up at him. His shoulders were all tight and electric again. Knowing that he wouldn’t make the first move, Fuu walked around and placed a hand on Mugen’s shoulder blade. He wrenched his arm away, causing her fingers to skip down his vertebrae.

Fuu tried again. She placed her hand on his shoulder, then drew it down to the sword that rested against his spine. She knew this sword, straight and true and foreign. The sheath held the characters, 香澄, her family name.

“This was my father’s sword,” Fuu said, smiling. She circled back around, peering up into Mugen’s face, tipped down to stare at his collar bone.

“You idiot,” she said softly.

“What was that?” He pulled out his hands again. Fuu reached for him. Between her palms, his fist was the size of a baseball. She flipped it over and pried open the willing fingers one by one.

“I trusted this hand with my father’s sword,” she said, “Whether or not I keep that money, I still trust you. Is that what you were angry about? That I brought up money between old friends?”

He pushed her away without much feeling. This time Fuu walked with him, side by side.

“What else is it?” Fuu asked.

He didn’t answer her, not until they had returned to Fuu’s house.

They were staying temporarily; Mugen was only a bodyguard after all. Their new adventure had started with the bandits in Uji and would end whenever Fuu said it would end. She had mentioned something about delivering a very important item to a very important customer. Whatever. It wasn’t the same, wasn’t like before, and they both knew it. Some of it was the money’s fault. Most of it was Mugen’s.

He pulled her into a stupid sloppy kiss he should have been able to blame on sake—but of course neither of them had been in the mood to drink, what between the reunion and the blood and the bleery moonlight. Hell, it must have been three in the morning. Fuu pushed him off and Mugen was glad of it.

“Still trust me?” he asked.

“Go buy a woman for all I care, Mugen,” she said, recovering quickly, “That kind of stuff won’t work on me anymore. I’m not some fifteen-year-old with a crush,”

She spread out the futons, ready to pull the shoji screen between them. Then, stopped.

Something had gotten shaken loose after all.

“Mugen,” she said. He looked at her, but when he saw her expression he felt his spine straighten. She hesitated; he had no choice but to hang on her every word.

Finally, she said, “Say my name,”

He didn’t know how to respond to that.

She smiled, just slightly. “You’ve never said my name before.”

He wanted to test that, test her, test himself. Even now.

“Come on over here,” he said. She did so nonchalantly. She wasn’t in any danger and she knew it.

 _“Here.”_ Mugen’s gaze didn’t waver.

Fuu acquiesced, getting down on her knees, first soothing (and she did just that, not smooth, but soothe) the space beside him and then spread out her body straight and in line with his. He touched the hem of her garment where the blood had dried.

“Where are the bandages?” he asked. It was her turn to look surprised. She told them they were by the entrance, in her money-purse. He got up and retrieved them and when he knelt beside her again he took her by the collar. She felt stiff for just a moment, then he felt her relax.

He opened her kimono and peeled back the layers till he got to the wound on her shoulder. She made a self-deprecatory remark about her breasts, wherein he offered this truth:

“I’m actually more of a shoulder guy myself,”

She got real quiet after that. He removed her old bandages. Wound was healing nicely—that’s because she had done the patchwork in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t really time to change the bandages but Mugen had an express purpose. He pulled the tourniquet tight, much tighter than she had been able to and probably much tighter than she would have liked. But she said nothing still, only grimaced. He didn’t offer to close up her kimono, so she took care of that herself. In fact, she removed the outer layer completely and slipped beneath the blanket. Almost naked as a blade.

“Mugen,” she said, looking at him as he put the bandages back and proceeded to slip beneath the covers. He shivered with the self-control of going no farther.

“ _What_ , Fuu?” he asked, seething on the edge of it.

She smiled, cheek pushed against the futon and her whole expression and the outline of her body just throwing him for a loop.

“Goodnight, Mugen,” she said.

The next hour Mugen spent staring at the opposite wall. Finally he had to inspect the tremors in his hand.

  
*

 

Next morning Mugen got up before she did and did not return, not until Fuu had almost given him up for good.

“Where have you been?” she called to his silent figure coming back up the hill, “We’re on a bit of a time crunch, don’t you know?”

She couldn’t keep her voice from sounding relieved, all the same.

He shoved the package into her hand. Fuu unwrapped it with a scowl, till she found herself relaxing against her will again. She pressed the blue silk to her chest and smiled.

“After this,” Mugen said as she continued rummaging around, keeping a mental checklist, “I’m done,”

“I understand, I understand,” Fuu hurried them along.

“And If I was done,” Mugen continued, at a pace and volume that forced Fuu to give him her full attention. “If I was done, and my mind was made up about that, would you still—?”

He let it hang there. It would always just hang there, unspoken. Fuu found herself holding her breath.

“Wait,” she said, eyes downcast. She stepped behind the shoji, becoming a milky silhouette. Mugen turned his head away; he wasn't sure why. He got kinda hazy over the sound of silk and cotton and skin.

When Fuu emerged his throat went dry.

The sight of her in the kimono he had picked at random for her did more for him than the unvisited promise of her body the night before. What was this, love? Her very vitality was wrapped in what she _was_. The terms “woman” or “friend” didn’t cross his mind. Instead—.

“Fuu?” it was the closest he’d ever gotten to begging.

“Yes,” she said, “Yes, I still would.”

*

He thought there was nobody left to outrun him.

Except—.

Except damn, she’d been outrunning him all this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pairs well with Kendrick Lamar's "Love."
> 
> First wrote this last year and posted it in a hurry. Was never truly satisfied with it so I've done some adding, subtracting, and tweaking and now I'm happier with it. Thank you for indulging me in my liberal use of italics. :-)
> 
> The biggest change was my inclusion of the themes from the legend of Parzival. This is a beautiful story, you guys. In it there's a lovely scene where Parzival resists the temptation of sleeping with a beautiful woman; later he lies down with his future wife and both of them, fully clothed, lie nose-to-nose and toe-to-toe, knowing one another and yet not knowing one another. It marks a great moment of growth for Parzival and is a wonderful illustration of equality and partnership between a man and a woman in medieval times. There's so much to unpack there and I love it. Below is a link to the Wikipedia article where I incidentally swiped the "vitality" line:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parzival


	8. Time Will Tell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editor from the future: Lol, I knew I should have checked in what context I had originally heard a certain word that had up-until-now featured in this one-shot. There was a word that I could have sworn meant batty old woman; friendly warning that if a word rhymes with 'tittie' it probably is another word for such. I think I've been writing in Mugen's perspective too much--I changed some verbage to make it more appropriate for Fuu's POV. Humility check!

 

 

 

 

_\--_

 

_Time will tell if you can figure this and work it out_  
_No one's waiting for you anyway so don't be stressed now_  
_Even if it's something that you've had your eye on_  
_It is what it is_

_\--_

 

Fuu had always been in love with the idea of not falling in love.

How many times had she looked at her mother and found the words the old aunties whispered had some truth to them? “She shouldn’t have married for pleasure. Now not even a son to support her!”

Thing was, Fuu still loved the old aunties. They were the aunts and servant women who didn’t have enough relatives to occupy all their free time, who found it in their hearts to help keep up the Kasumi’s failing lands, to dress Fuu, to hold her mother’s hand in the last months of her illness. They were the ones who first showed Fuu what love from the outside world could look like.

It softened the transition, from the daughter of a poor samurai to an orphan sleeping beside her aunt and uncle in a musty old tea shop. Fuu had known this particular aunt for several years; she was kind and gossiped less than the others. She told Fuu what her mother was like as a little girl, how her parents met. Her mother was harvesting tea leaves. He had been thirsty. Her mother led him to the well. Later, she made him tea. Later still, he converted her to that barbarian religion. And so on.

Fuu had been born two years later, on the 3rd of February. She felt that a winter birthday wasn’t especially appropriate, but then life confused her enough already. In her heart, she was a summer child. In her soul, she felt like autumn. “Contradictory”—that was a word her mother used from time to time. Her aunt and uncle used it in the tea shop as well. Fuu should have known better, should have been more like her mother. But in everything Fuu found herself trying to re-enact the tall man in the sunflower fields. That is what she remembered—that he was long and tempered and direct. Like a sword. His absence had felt so dangerous, so empty, exactly like a scabbard without its blade. Fuu tried to be sharp in her father’s absence; to be soft in her mother’s presence.

It was nice, traveling with the boys. She could lean back, relax a little, enjoy both the hardscrabble of the road—of which she had made a game of imagining any number of worst-case scenarios she would survive—and enjoy the soft ministrations of tea at an inn and playing nursemaid and attendant to the men with swords. This reality was comforting and painful at the same time, like her childhood memories. Every time she looked at Jin, for instance, she was keen on his profile to the point of sadness. He looked so much like her father.

On the other hand, Mugen made her feel lost. It was probably very much because he was her first love and all that jazz.

Fuu had just finished sewing together Mugen’s new haori. She thought (but she couldn’t be sure—this was Mugen she was thinking about) that Mugen had been upset when Fuu had given Jin her father’s old clothing, the only other garment found in the hut besides the clothes he had died in. But Mugen had looked surprised—for half-a-second—when she presented him with the new haori and her father’s sword.

A recent streak of Fuu’s luck at the local gambling halls had lined their pockets with mon. So they pooled their funds together to stay for one night at a ryokan with a hot springs, a buffet, the works; they put rosemary in the baths and served the fillet of cows weaned on cherry wine. All sorts of things that Mugen, for one, didn’t know how to fully appreciate. He carried that same quality of disregard into their last hours; perhaps he was being defensive. They all knew what lay ahead of them the next day.

They had just returned from the hot springs when Fuu, braiding her wet hair, suddenly turned on the boys and nearly pounced on them with her offer:

“We can’t let this end without a fire!”

Both boys cocked an eyebrow, though Mugen’s was considerably more intrigued. Disappointment played on his features when he realized he hadn’t corrupted Fuu so entirely as to make her a pyromaniac.

“I’m talking about making a bonfire in the valley out back,” Fuu said as she gathered what few things they would need from their rooms, “For old time’s sake,”

Once they had settled some distance from the inn and Jin had gotten the fire started, they had no qualms about what to throw in. They gathered pretty much anything that could burn. Old bandages, the first leaves of autumn, cloth napkins that Mugen had swiped from the ryokan. Fuu threw in her diary—whether it was the real or the fake, neither of the boys could be sure. There _was_ the embarrassing discovery that Mugen was still carrying around a certain ukiyo-e scroll that may or may not have depicted Fuu’s breasts; he said he just hadn’t had the chance to sell it. In the scramble to rip the scroll to shreds, Fuu never did manage to figure out what sleight of hand Mugen performed to keep it out of her grasp.

With the fire now roaring, they all sat together in silence. Just a few weeks ago, Fuu would have tried to fill it with stories or by peppering the boys with questions. She still wanted to ask them things, a million things. Contentment, however, is learning to savor the cup. There was nothing to pour out and nothing to pour in, no bitter to sift for sweet.

Years down the road, Fuu would recall that silent hour like it was yesterday. Like it was the first hour of the rest of her life.

One thing for certain was conveyed, before they doused the fire and trudged back to the inn. Who was it that had said it? Fuu couldn’t recall. She knew they all had meant it, one and the same:

_“Well, if you need me, you know where to find me.”_

The following dawn saw Fuu awake and hungry. She didn’t think, on that particular day, she’d have that much appetite; but she took care of the ryokan’s breakfast offerings in a none-too-subtle fashion. She thought she was the only one up. It was Jin she might have expected to fill the role of silent table companion, but she nearly jumped out of her skin when Mugen was the one that managed to sneak up on her and sit down opposite. When had he learned to be this quiet?

“Sup,” he said, then they both finished their food in silence. This was something else Fuu had learned about herself. Somewhere, at some time (she thinks it might have been Mugen who taught it to her; Mugen with his yang and his skeletons and his loneliness and yet, no less, his unflinching spice for life), in all this, she’d shed that incessant girlhood care over whether it was her absence or her presence that meant anything to anyone. That is, if anyone gave a damn.

Oh, they did. But they didn’t have to talk about it.

“Hey.” Fuu finally said, sliding her hand along the table. Not touching Mugen’s hand, of course. Just letting him know that it was there.

He scowled. Looked out the window. Finally, he said, “You don’t make it easy on me, do you?”

Jin joined them afterwords. Before departing, Fuu did place her hand on his; an expression of their relationship and the degrees of difference between one boy and the other. She almost called Jin big brother; he heard the catch of that first syllable same as she did, same as Mugen did. So each man knew where they stood in the murky scheme of things. And both were secretly, deep-down, satisfied.

Fuu mentioned something about Uji to the two of them; she bragged about the sunflowers that grew there. She wondered, too, what the old chorus would say about her now.

At the crossroads: _mata itsuka_ — we’ll meet again.

When the prodigal daughter finally did return, she didn’t have to wait long to find out just what the old women had to say. They didn’t care to hear about the adventures or the scars, and they didn’t comment on how she smelled like wood-smoke and the sea. There was a look on her face that they knew would get Fuu into trouble. It was a look they knew all too well, a look that had dragged many a young woman, like Fuu’s mother, through the ringer:

_“Why’d you have to go and do a thing like fall in love?”_

Except Fuu wasn’t her mother, and this wasn’t her tragic fate. She merely parted the sea of worrying old aunts and servant women and found the place where she used to smell the sunflowers.

 

_If you need me, you know where to find me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the inspiration playlist this time around is the following;
> 
> Time Will Tell - Blood Orange  
> (credit for lyrics at beginning)  
> February 3rd - Jorja Smith  
> Sunflower - Post Malone & Swae Lee


	9. Brother

She had often ached for a boy's adventure.

A boy, sharp instrument in hand, went off to seek his adulthood. A girl was visited by it. She carried the way with her wherever she went. Fuu's mother had explained everything with a soft hand on her shoulder the day it happened.

Fuu still preferred swords.

In fact, she preferred a brother.

An older brother might have carried some of the weight. An older brother might have helped her mother be less regretful in death. An older brother might have taught Fuu the things she wished she knew.

She tried to be an older brother to herself, with mixed results. Folklore and random men on the street became her inspiration. She studied the men who drifted--or dragged--or doddled--or drove themselves into the confines of her aunt and uncle's tea shop. Nobody fit her definition of manhood. Nobody like the ghost of her father, for instance.

In her spare time, she twisted her tanto around, acutely aware she had no idea what she was doing. This wasn't what being a man was all about; or a father. But she only knew uncles, and imaginary brothers, and men with swords.

Fuu wanted to find out what the road held--what compelled men to follow its trail. Wanted to find her father, and understand why she wanted one so badly.

The day she flipped the coin, Fuu had been aching for a boy’s adventure.

So she called tails and got one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A 250 word challenge this time. I thought this was going to be about Jin and it ended up being about Fuu growing up, mostly.


	10. Kanasasoulmn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes there is Fuugen in this one, if you’re patient. ;)

I.

An old woman had once told Mugen that when a Ryukyuan faces suffering, they look at the ocean. It’s _hope_ , she said. The child that he was had almost been satisfied with that answer; but a word like hope didn’t hold anything concrete for him. He’d come to the beach with the funny women who went off with funny men in the hopes of finding his mother. Hope was supposed to be something tangible. Like rice, or shelter. Hope would have been his mother on the beach. Instead, the old woman told him to look across the ocean. Then she gave him half of her baked beni-imo.

Mugen straggled back the next day, just as hungry and hopeful as he had been before. He spotted the old woman on a different stretch of shore with the same expression on her leathery face. She had a slight smirk, a sliver of knowing, but this melted when she looked from the ocean to Mugen’s face. Even though her clothes were dirty and smelled like musk, she used it to wipe the clotted blood out of Mugen’s nose. She didn’t ask what happened to him. Instead, she pointed to her own nose, to the crooked bones.

“Same thing happened to me,” she said, her voice lulling like a child’s. Mugen just stared at her.

“—when I was your age,” the woman finished, then turned her face back to the sea. Mugen’s eyes roamed over her person, in search of more potatoes, or fruit, or—anything. Seeing that she couldn’t give this to him, he instead asked:

“Where’s Anmaa?”

The old woman looked like she had been asked this question before. Still, she made a point of searching Mugen’s face, perhaps trying to find some common feature she had seen in the other women. Mugen grew uncomfortable under her scrutiny. Restless, he kicked the sand. He didn’t mind that some got in her eye; at least she stopped staring at him.

The woman didn’t seem to mind. She brushed at her eyes and then sighed. In the distance, both of them could hear a grumble of discontent. A group of drunken men had just arrived at the shack where the girls took turns. The old woman heard a name she recognized. Then a high-pitched laugh that sounded both forced and frightened.

“Come back tomorrow,” the old woman said, hiking up her skirts and turning towards the shack.

So Mugen did.

He would make a habit of it; after all, there was usually a sturdy chance that food would be shared. The old woman, from then on Baachi, in turn shared other things with him. On days she had nothing to give him, no satisfactory answer or bite to eat, she fished tobacco from her tobacco pouch and taught him how to smoke. Anything she showed him, whether smoking or fishing or swimming or just a word or phrase or two, Baachi usually attended with, “Same thing was taught to me, when I was your age.” A lot had happened at five, six, seven, eight, nine. Over the years, the visiting would become more sporadic. Mugen didn’t have as many questions, and he looked with contempt at the other shrieking women who kept themselves on the opposite side of the beach. He found their laughter annoying.

“You won’t find it annoying one of these days,” Baachi had said, looking at him sadly, then, bluntly, “With that Mukuro, you don’t stand a chance,”

Mugen didn’t like that, being summed up, but then he was munching on some of the dried fish she had brought that day so he didn’t complain. The waves instead filled the silence, and as the foam lapped at their toes, Baachi pointed and said:

“Aa,”

A vocabulary lesson. The word and the sound of the word produced the same effect—it was the most accurate word for it. A bubble, froth, foam, scuds, sud. Aa.

“The person you think of when you look at the ocean,” Baachi continued, not looking at Mugen, perhaps not knowing he was still there, “That’s the person you’re in love with,”

  
II.

It was around sixteen, seventeen that Mugen took a backwards dive off the cliff with his hands tied. When the water hit his back, concentrated right between his shoulder blades and then cupping his head with a loud smack, it knocked the soul right out of him. The saltwater quickened into a smothering balm, cool and inviting, untethering all of his weight save his tied hands. He didn’t even think about the bullets. Working with his bruised shoulders and legs—on the strength given to the desperate--he managed to swim. Not unlike a fish missing a fin. Sharks swam in this part of the water but a few stray bullets had forced them out to sea. Mugen couldn’t have cared less about sharks or bullets or the next buffeting wave. There was only staying afloat and stealing as much air and as little saltwater into his lungs as possible. When he dragged himself to the dinky little handmade boat he’d hidden in a grotto only he and one other person knew about, it was only then he registered that he had also cracked a rib.

In the grotto, there was a tobacco pouch. There was a child’s knife. Mugen managed to cut his ropes and roll up a shabby smoke before he realized how much soul had actually left his bones. Everything was cold and soft and salty. His muscles could slip right off.

In the grotto, the aa of the waves put him to sleep.

It was a sleep that packed a thousand years into a second. Boiling water…cool memory…floating. Mugen felt his shoulder grow warm, then hot. As though still submerged in water, his arm moved, his opposite hand tried to find the place where the heat came from. Blood ran down his arm, and it was blood that his fingers pressed. He forced his eyes open.

Yellow darkness enveloped the cave, but it was not the grotto that Mugen awoke to. The sound of water had ceased. Foliage replaced stone and the sky stretched farther and farther away. Not a shore in sight. Not a smell to go by, no salt, no earth, no blood. Instead, a distant world of yellow heat, of blood on boulders, of vines and the narrow pathways through them. The only other signs of life were moths, small and yellow themselves, small and yellow enough to look like leaves on the tree, and the birds of prey that devoured them. Wind blew in the shedding trees but made no sound.

Mugen’s arm no longer felt like it was moving through water. It wasn’t moving at all. Cupping his shoulder, his hand dug into muscle and bone so that the flow of blood slowed. In this way, he limped.

The thousand years packed into the single second continued playing tricks on him. This wasn’t time, not anymore. Sensations would suffice, out of context, out of time. For instance, there was a memory of collapsing, with his hand still clutching his shoulder. Memory of the only bird that wasn’t a bird of prey; foreign, too bright, impossible to identify. Red breast like a cry to be loved for its scarlet brightness, to be shot at for its flamboyant disregard. And indigo wings; indigo, which brought to mind the eesumiyaa, the indigo dye shack that had turned into the world’s quickest, cheapest, shabbiest brothel on the world’s worst beach on the world’s worst island. And that reminded Mugen of how the shack had burned, how he had emerged from the burning to find Mukuro, and how it was Mukuro who had started this whole mess.

Except no. If Mugen hadn’t been looking for the eesumiyaa, he wouldn’t have run into Mukuro again. If he hadn’t been betrayed by Baachi, he wouldn’t be in the eesumiyaa.

But then again, if it hadn’t been for the eesumiyaa, he wouldn’t have been born.

Drifting elsewhere, Mugen brought his attention back to the bird. To the trees. To the yellow moths. Kohza appeared. The hand on his shoulder now pressed down on bandages. The blood had been washed away. But was it Kohza who had done this? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t care. A strange, ashy peace descended over him. There was only one word for all of this, anyway, and it wasn’t memory or sleep or death.

Niruyakanaya. On earth as it is in heaven. The place where the gods live and all things begin.

  
III.

Only authorities and jealous wives out-and-out say what a brothel is: a brothel. Euphemisms usually do. The red light district, the pleasure house, the place where things go bump in the night. On the island where Mugen was born, they called it the eesumiyaa.

The old indigo dye shack had been out of commission for quite some time, at least as long as Mugen had been alive. Evidence included nobody wearing the color indigo unless they had smuggled some such dyed clothing off an unlucky ship. The color never really interested Mugen; too dark, too sullen. He had long ago noticed that only whores on the island wore the color on the regular anyway. Somehow, even in a hell whose denizens were the lowest of the low, there was still a caste system. And whores scraped the bottom of the barrel. But this is where everybody’s mother ended up, so what does that tell you?

The facts surrounding Baachi and the old shack occurred to Mugen long before he had stopped visiting Baachi. He realized he had always kinda known. Baachi wasn’t his mother, or his aunt, she wasn’t a goddess, she wasn’t strong. She couldn’t protect Mugen, and she wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t let her. She was just another sadsack of the island, tossed around by everyone else. Too old and ugly to be any good at her job but too pitiful to do anything else. She stared at the ocean. She pined. She probably knew who his mother was and hadn’t told him anyway. Well, he was glad.

Mukuro frequented the eesumiyaa. That was one reason why Mugen stayed away from it. Small betrayals had long preceded that.

The first happened when Mugen was nine-years-old. He’d had a raw feeling all day; an empty stomach, nothing more than that. It wasn’t like him not to trust his left-of-bang instincts, but hunger and something else still drove him to the whores’ beach that day. He scowled at the sight of it. Baachi was not waiting in any of her normal places, nor did she arrive at her normal times. Mugen lingered in the pine-hidden expanse near the beach, climbing the trees in search of food, in search of a better perch. He took brief naps, always interrupted by the thought that maybe he had heard Baachi’s voice down by the shore. This was never the case. He made a camp of it all the same. Sufficing himself on crickets for dinner and a tree limb for a bed, he fell asleep with his arm draped over his eyes and slept not a dreamless sleep.

He dreamed about a bird with a woman’s voice. A dream that you did not fully awake from, even after opening your eyes. When Mugen opened his, the woman’s voice continued. She wasn’t exactly speaking; she wasn’t exactly singing. Her footsteps were light, stirring the grass and leaves underfoot. Mugen tried opening his eyes further but dawn this time of year was full and harsh. As he went to cover his eyes he lost his balance and fell with an unceremonious crash.

The voice stopped. The footsteps quickened. Now hands cradled Mugen’s head. He was lost in this embrace, only momentarily, before he choked on a word:

“Anmaa?”

Except it sounded nothing like that, being that his lip was swollen and there was blood in his mouth. Hazily he looked up to search the woman’s face. Now the harsh morning light illuminated not his mother, not some nori priestess even. It was Baachi. Old, leathery Baachi. Her face looked puzzled, like she hadn’t understood him.

Mugen shot up.

“You’re not—”

He balled his hands into fists, soaked up every disappointing detail of her, that mug with that voice. Where had she been yesterday? Why had she taken everything away from him, just like that, just by being the wrong one to show up, and to show up late?

He ran then, spitting blood out the side of his mouth.

IV.

Baachi didn’t really betray him. She didn’t betray Mugen especially, anyway. Even in her last two betrayals, this was still the case. You see, Mugen had never met a person who stayed. He’d never gotten much of the long haul.

This was still true at nineteen, twenty.

Fuu’s footsteps were soft. Not exactly light; the broad made way too much noise. That kind of volume was fine for Mugen who, if he ever disturbed the peace and got the wrong guy in a tizzy, he could fend for himself. But Fuu was a city girl; she knew next to nothing about making it on the road. Put her in a gambling hall, surround her with the burliest men you can find, make her look a yakuza in the eye or kidnap her and just try and keep her in a brothel—any of those scenarios and Fuu could fend for herself with a graceless resourcefulness not unlike Mugen’s. But put her on the road and she was a moving target.

Fuu’s footsteps were unmistakable, but they were soft. She had joints so thin they popped—it was her ankles as she walked up and down hills, it was her wrists as she turned them. Surprisingly pleasant. Not that a word like ‘pleasant’ usually crossed Mugen’s mind. If pressed for something, he might have come up with ‘alright.’ She was alright.

That same loud softness amplified in Mugen’s half-dead slumber. A particular recollection. Shortly after they’d run into Mukuro and Kohza again: fire, water, looking death straight in the eye like it was a habit. That time-out-of-time experience again. Memory of his first kill, which had really been first kills. That place again. Next, a quality conversation with the Pantu. An agreement. A reversal. Mugen drifted back into consciousness, like a boat coming out of a storm. Strong smell of fish, hacking on seawater. Arms enveloped him. He didn’t have the energy to be annoyed, but he almost hated being held. A man whimpered. Somebody that sounded like Jin grunted, and Mugen felt his weight being shifted from one bony shoulder to another. His feet dragged in the sand. Then a light touch on his wet clothes. The girl.

This next part he was more awake for. The tug on his clothes was efficient, careful, and nearly painless. Fuu sucked in a breath at the sight of his shoulder. She sponged lukewarm water over him first, taking away a layer of fish and salt-rime and blood. She took her tanto and dug something out of one of his wounds. The sensation didn’t bother him much. Next she removed what was left of his clothing and quickly draped him with a thin cotton haori she must have bought especially for this occasion. He let her go the first time she left, to go hang his wet clothes on the line. She returned. Was it a necessary or unnecessary action, her combing her fingers through his hair? Either way, that part seemed to go by in a flash. Too soon her fingers left, having done the work of pushing the hair off his face. She used a fresh cloth to wipe up the sweat that had beaded on his forehead and slid down his temples. When she got up to leave a second time, he grabbed her small, soft-loud wrist in his and liked the feel of her stopping, of her looking back at him. She didn’t hear what he said, his lips being swollen, so she brought her face closer. He came up with something to get her to leave, and she did, again with that graceless efficiency—the Fuu special. He felt peaceful and hollowed out all at the same time. Her footsteps were so _loud_. And as they retreated, he opened his eyes.

Mukuro was going to pay.

His entire life, all the parts connected to Mukuro, replays in his mind. With a steady limp and the long scroll of a summer sun, he has plenty of time to build up his revenge. His childhood had been coming to this point for a long, long time. Mugen would make sure it hurt like a mother.

Mukuro had taken him to the eesumiya when Mugen was around fourteen. Mugen’s voice had finally dropped and Mukuro thought it would be fun to set him up. Bastard was probably going to watch, too. Like nobody on the island wasn’t aware of what the shack was. Mukuro liked to pretend he was the one who showed Mugen everything. But Mugen wasn’t Kohza and he wasn’t going to cling onto Mukuro like he was some false big brother type who knew all and was all. But Mugen was taken there at night and he was already partially drunk. When he was thrown into the shack he tripped and sprawled and found his sharp elbow sticking into a soft stomach. He reached his hand out in the dark to find the edge of the bench and sat himself down. He couldn’t see a thing.

“Gotta smoke?” he asked, partially for his nerves and partially so he could have a little light to see by.

“I’m the one you don’t get to do in the light,” the woman said, sounding older than Mugen expected, sounding like she had smoked for years and years herself. She tapped the side of her open palm against his forearm.

“Money,” she said. When Mugen didn’t reply, she modified her request:

“Shells, soapnuts? I can do with a kimono sleeve; just one. I’m not picky—but I’m not free either,” she sighed then, “…is the boy outside paying, then?”

Mugen kicked the door of the shack open, exposing it to moonlight. He didn’t look back. He made a break for it, running full-tilt and kicking up sand, with Mukuro and his boys laughing it up and placing their bets and sloshing their newly stolen sake around. Mugen couldn’t run fast enough. Not fast enough to hear the door creak closed again and a new kind of cheering to begin.

Why Mukuro set the place in flames years later was anybody’s guess. He wasn’t exactly a guy who did things for their own sake, for casual cruelty; he was always two, three steps ahead. Maybe it hadn’t even been Mukuro. But it might as well have been. He was there when Mugen emerged from the shack and he was pointing a gun and that’s all Mugen needed to go by. He’d already found the bodies. He’d already found the body. What had he been doing there? Ignoring left-of-bang again. He hadn’t even come for _her_. He’d wanted solitude. The stars. Rising from his place on the beach, he’d run the entire half-mile with a feeling that had no name. He’d smelled the fire before he saw it.

Mugen had nothing to lose, so why did he feel like if he didn’t run fast enough he’d lose this, whatever this was? Shrieking women, even some shrieking men, streamed past him. Mugen gathered that the bastards had recently crossed paths with Mukuro. He recognized their lame gang insignias. Sure enough, Mukuro’s men patrolled the border of the eesumiyaa, watching not even with drunken mirth. This had been done in cold blood. Who cares who started it; Mukuro’s gang would make sure it was finished.

A few dark figures still danced within the shack. Mugen plunged in, knowing he’d make no difference but needing to plunge all the same. He was still wet from the ocean, from sweat, but the hiss of steam provided only brief relief. Holding his breath, he did not flinch because of the heat or the smoke in his eyes. He reached out to grab something, anything. It was stupid, unfair, typical, the things that make it out of a tragedy. The only thing that hadn’t gone up in flames was a discarded tobacco pouch, which Mugen grabbed and stuck down his trunks without a second thought. Then, he too emerged from the flames, as immune as the devil himself. Smell of bodies burning--Mugen didn't have a word for that either. 

He had no prayers for her, only that feeling he could not name. It wasn’t pity. Years later, he felt something similar when he realized that in the end it wasn’t Mukuro who had dug the knife in his back but Kohza. The person that can heal you is also in the same position to kill you; it comes down to survival in the end. So another nobody from the world’s worst island had eaten their own. But really, what had Mugen lost, that first time and that last time?

He’d lost an answer he was never going to receive.

 

V.

Baachi had shown him the grotto sometime between the ages of five and nine. At this point, he couldn’t remember. His memory had never been exact. That day, they’d eaten sweet potato leaves. She taught him how to fish.

He’d later abandon a dozen things here: his childhood knife, chicken bones, baby teeth, grouse eggs, the curiosity of a yellowed human skull he’d dug up at the nearest beach. But Baachi and he never did cross paths at that grotto again. It was probably the first gift that Mugen had ever really been given, something that wasn’t shared, something that wasn’t to keep him from starving to death. Better than tobacco, that’s for sure.

He’ll make it back to that grotto, sometime after the journey is done. He picks up other things to discard there along the way. On a whim, he swipes a sack of sunflower seeds. He’s got a strange thing on his mind, the entire time. Out of the corner of his eye, or just his mind’s eye, he sees a foreign bird. He thinks about Jin sometimes, when he sees that bird, or a wandering samurai, or a line of pudgy stone Buddhas marking the trail of a tributary. He thinks about Fuu a lot of the time, and deliberately forgets Fuu a lot of the time, when he sees that bird, or a tea shop, or when he nonchalantly slices up a raid hell-bent on routing out the few remaining Christians still breathing in the land of the rising sun. Or, gentler reminders, unwanted reminders, like the sakura trees he’ll glimpse next spring or a pinwheel in the wind.

Fuu and Jin didn’t really betray him.

At the end of that summer when they stood at the crossroads and she, having learned much more about the roads in their travels together, took the high way home (wherever home was, she said she was still deciding), Mugen knew this particular walk of hers as though he had already seen it. He knew this was going to happen. He felt that hollowed out peace again, strange and ashy. He didn’t have the word for it until he made his way back to the sea and looked out across the shore.

He makes it to Ryukyu the following summer. He makes it to the grotto. He shakes the seeds loose and sees them scatter in the wind, and bothers to bury and water some of them. He gets bored after a while and starts thinking about what kind of boat would take him back across the ocean. In a pine-hidden expanse near the charred remains of an indigo dye shack, he picks a tree. He’s got a history with this tree. It looks so much shorter to Mugen than it had looked back when he was nine-years-old and falling out of it.

In the grass he finds a place to rest, to feel the reality of the tree as it still is, before he’s going to chop it down, whittle it up, make it sail. The thing he hadn’t meant that day, the thing she hadn’t heard. He wonders if he’s still looking for it. He wonders if, really, he had seen her again. Waiting for him, in that upside-down paradise. Didn’t matter so much, not right now, not when he had somebody waiting for him a considerably shorter distance—just 400 miles or so—just a year or two or less away.

Nothing concrete to go on, but then hope was a funny thing like that. So was memory. And so was—.

If there was a word for it, it couldn’t compare to the certain truth Mugen now possessed when he looked out across the ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Words:
> 
> Beni-imo - purple sweet potatoes native to Okinawa  
> Anmaa - Mama  
> Baachi - Aunty  
> Aa - A bubble; foam; froth; scum; scuds.  
> Eesumiyaa - indigo dye house (I liked that better than writing out indigo dye house every time).  
> Kanasasoulmn - to love to the point of sadness
> 
> Source: Mitsugu Sakihara’s “Okinawan-English Wordbook”
> 
> More resources:  
> https://endofspring.wordpress.com/why/  
> https://www.rethinkingschools.org/articles/uchinaaguchi-the-language-of-my-heart  
> \--  
> I didn't rewatch episodes 13 and 14 until I was half-way through this one-shot. Then I thought, oh! So I ran with this a bit. Connected to previous one-shot, 'Niruya Kanaya.' Thanks for reading!


	11. The Gentle Art of Dying Dangerously (1925)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, this baby is a bit different! All you need to know is that it's heavily based on the 1920s Seaplane Adventure Story that is Hayao Miyazaki's "Porco Rosso" AND I based some of the story conventions off a documentary (I read a story called to 'Fade to White' by Catherynne M. Valente last year and I've been itching to try a documentary-inspired short story ever since). Why did I do any of this? Because experimenation is fun and the idea won't leave me alone. Anyhoot, thanks (in advance) for reading!

 

—  
THE GENTLE ART OF DYING DANGEROUSLY:  
A DOCUMENTARY (OF SORTS)

—

**Summer 1925/Walk on Water**

You could go as far as the Ogasawara Islands: that’s the farthest anyone has ever been, officially. But then Mugen’s flown farther still.

In that high summer of 1925, he’d become known for a lot of things. The dogfight of the decade, the seven minutes in heaven, the cameo in a Hollywood action movie, the rumors of cold pirate wars and long-standing bets and government spies.

That summer began with his return beyond Ogasawara, with his scuffed and scarlet seaplane coming in for a landing at a little restaurant-cum-hotel called Fuu’s Place.

  
**Fuu’s Place/The Long-Standing Bet**

Pirates, retired Yakuza, decorated debtors from the Great War, up-and-coming entertainers, and general gentle company (even some foreigners) filled the benches, huddled in a hobbled-together building some parts traditional Japanese ryokan and some parts Adriatic ristorante. There was an Italian gazebo and English roses in the middle of the zen garden, and American movie posters were tastefully tacked on the frames of shoji screens. For many, it was a second home with a little bit of everything, smack dab in the middle of the sea.

Fuu Kasumi owns the place. Despite using her father’s name, she’s been married three times and, at the time of the documentary’s recording, recently widowed a third time. She is 29-years-old and, despite her Modern Gal attire, she’s every inch the traditional Japanese beauty. She’s willowy, not at all well-endowed, and her hair when not hidden in a trendy hat is still done up in a style that would have done the Meiji era proud. Interviews with her, as local newspaper reports will tell it, are always granted, but they’re usually brief.

_(CENTER on a poised woman in her garden, the month’s ledger in her lap. The sun is bright and her cloche hat shades her carefully made-up eyes)._

FUU: I didn’t know much about Mugen’s past. What I did know was hearsay. He hasn’t got many friends left. He never had many to begin with. But I knew him and Jin both before the War.

INTERVIEWER: Jin was your first husband, is that correct?

FUU: Annulled. And yes. Jin—well, marriage and love are a bit more complicated here than they are overseas. Jin is a good man. Back when I was fifteen, orphaned, didn’t even have this place…he took care of me. It’s a frank term, but I’m not like most girls and I like being frank. The term I’m looking for is ‘marriage of convenience.’ I was protected, till I was eighteen, and then Jin was free to marry whomever he chose. As was I. No—I see the question in your eyes, and the answer is ‘No.’ The marriage was never, shall we say, a ‘marriage.’

INTERVIEWER: Do you mind elaborating on your other nuptials?

FUU: Only if you don’t mind me asking what they have to do with the documentary?

INTERVIEWER: Well, all of your husbands have been seaplane pilots….

FUU: My second husband, Shinsuke, he died in the Great War. My third husband I met here, at the restaurant. He was a mail carrier, as far as the Ogasawara Islands. He was the only one that ever went out that far, at least as far as the government mail would go. This last time…he didn’t come back. We only got the official ruling recently.

INTERVIEWER: The Ogasawara Islands…that’s where another pilot, Mugen, is returning from today. Isn’t that right?

FUU: They ask me that every day, y’know—is Mugen coming in today? Do you know why they ask me that? Well, how should I know? It’s like they think I can sense these things in the wind. Maybe I do. Like I’ve said, I’ve known Mugen and Jin a very long time. Since 1910, to be exact. We got in a lot of scrapes back then, too. But even during those times, I knew—I knew my boys would be safe. Besides, you could say I have a long-standing bet. I bet myself if a certain man comes to visit me in this garden during the day, and tells me he’s regained his soul, then we’ll fall in love.

_(At this point, Fuu stands. They have been filming in her garden a long time now, and the sun is setting, but even against the red sky she spots the red seaplane)._

FUU CON’D: There he is now.

  
**A High and Defiant Resolve/A Low and Uncommon Restraint**

When Mugen enters civilized society (and to hear his friends tell it, it’s a rare, perhaps bimonthly occasion), it’s to do one of three things: refill his seaplane’s tank, flirt with beautiful bimbos, or eat, alone, on the second floor of Fuu’s Place.

He only every comes at night, the ladies lament. Seems he’s got a thing for big-breasted women in particular; he likes the aspiring actresses and saucy singers at the hotel the best. Funny—everybody else is in love with Fuu. She’s got a girlish figure, and despite her openness, has clearly been bred with mainland mannerisms in mind. It’s hard for some patrons to believe that she was a tomboy growing up.

She saw Mugen come in that night. He made a pass at a woman at the bar, told the cook he’d be waiting for his food upstairs, and then lit a cigarette as he passed his gaze around the room, all the time not even looking at her. She is talking to a round table of pirate captains and smiling beguilingly, but her eyes keep returning to the second balcony. She tells the band to start up the music and excuses herself.

As Fuu ascended the flight of stairs leading to the second floor, a tall and garish figure looked at her forlornly. His name is Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu, though you might be excused for forgetting it. He’d only recently come to the islands. His aspirations were high—he planned to be, in this order: 1) a daring seaplane pilot 2) a dazzling Hollywood star and 3) the future Prime Minister of Japan. And, like everybody else, he’s in love with the idea of Fuu’s back (again, this can be blamed on the Europeans, what with their scandalous taste in open-backed dresses).

At that moment, Fuu is not thinking about Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu. But the act of her walking up those stairs and sitting next to Mugen got Sakon thinking.

Fuu had a thing for seaplane pilots. After all, she’d married three of them. Well, Sakon may have a wife and children and absolutely no real aviation skills whatsoever, but he thinks his problems could be solved if he started talking to some of the pirates crowding up the place that night. See how he can dismantle a certain ‘Red Rooster of the East China Sea’ that Fuu seems to have a thing for. Sakon’s noticed every single one of the pirates in the bar is staring daggers at the man on the second floor balcony. Rumors travel fast at Fuu’s Place. The general chatter went something like this:

GENERAL CHATTER: …Yeah, that’s the one they call to bust up pirate raids. He’s got a contract with the big boss around here…Even has a secret hideout; can’t show his face on the main land…Why? Warrant for his arrest, who are you? Who doesn’t know that? …See, he was some bigshot in the War—then he deserted before his term was up. Go on, ask that guy over there. He’s known him since before the whole world went bang.

The person Sakon was ushered around to was a tall, severe fellow with the most beautiful shade of skin Sakon had ever seen. It unnerved him, really—not even his wife had skin as alabaster as this guy’s. (Jin, the patrons told Sakon the guy’s name was Jin). Doubly alarming was the sheer volume of Jin’s perfect black hair, contrasted with the foreignness of his spectacles. And despite the man’s almost stick-like figure, an aura emanated from him that told Sakon this Jin guy could probably break in his shin just by looking at it. So Sakon approached cautiously, which in typical Sakon style, looked something like this:

_(ZOOM IN on an OVER-EAGER MALE in a fiery purple kimono and ragged pair of hakama as he boldly places his foot up on the bar next to a CALM MALE PATRON. The patron adjusts his glasses so that, as the glass catches the light and causes a glare, his expression is unreadable. The over-eager male begins monologue)._

SAKON: I, Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu, future Prime Minister of Japan, have heard no rumor tonight that did not circle back to you, mysterious bespectacled stranger. I know you to be a strong man, though you look unassuming, and you cannot deny your connection to the rogue bounty hunter called Mugen and the beguiling Kyoto beauty called Fuu—

JIN: Not Kyoto. Uji.

SAKON: W-what? Ah! Uji! The land of…tea! Yes, of course. An incomparable creature! A delicate flower! The blood that beats in my heart! Do you acknowledge my desperation? Do you hear the nuance of heartbreak in my tone? If my loyal followers had not retired early, they would be hear to give you the official spiel, the details of my combat experience, my character, my reputation, etc., and now, as of tonight, the fresh wound in my bosom. As such, you have only I, and I—am quite shy.

JIN: Hnn.

SAKON: Even so! I can deny it no longer. I would ask that Uji beauty to marry me tonight, to be mine, to grace the land of Japan as the wife of its future Prime Minister! But, my man, I do not yet possess that which would impress her most. You see, I must best this Red Rooster I keep hearing about—and I must become a grandizing seaplane pilot in order to do so. I must shoot him down in a—a-what’s-it—a dogfight!

JIN: Grandizing? Do you know if that’s a word?

SAKON: It means grander than grand!

JIN _(impatiently)_ : What does any of this have to do with me?

_(The over-eager male now throws himself at the patron’s feet. There are real tears in his eyes)._

SAKON: Tell me one thing.

_(The patron is now deadly patient; he may not be for much longer)._

SAKON: Tell me—who must I hire?! Who here in this restaurant could fight for me? I had thought about them pretending to be me, but that seems a bit cliche, doesn’t it? What if I just hire—that guy? No? This one? Aren’t they all pirate captains? Is there no one who could take on Mugen in this entire forsaken archipelago?!

_(A beat)._

JIN: Only me.

_MEANWHILE:_

At a lone table on the second story balcony, the subject of the documentary is sitting down for a plate of food he has not yet bothered to specify. It’s all delicious, it’s all fresh, just caught that afternoon, but all he cares about is the fact that it’s food. He does nurse his cigarette a bit, savoring the taste of one that isn’t damp from sea mist. His thoughts, as always, are both immediately present—focused, narrow, with nothing to spare for what or who might be in his immediate vicinity—and far away, lost as they’ve ever been, hidden as they’ll always be. This is Fuu’s interpretation, at least. She sits across from him with her chin in her palm and looks between Mugen and the wall of pictures behind him. There’s only one picture of the trio together: Fuu, Mugen, and Jin, as filtered through sepia, through the honeyed look of the world as only seen by a fifteen-year-old. It was taken at the end of their road trip, back in the summer of 1910. Could it really have been fifteen years ago? It felt longer. There was a war mixed in there, after all. The whole world had gone bang.

_(There are no cameras at this time. Fuu had told them to go home)._

“So,” she said, “Did you find what you were looking for this time?”

“What was I looking for again?” Mugen mumbled over the last bite of fish.

“Really, Mugen,” Fuu did feel fifteen at that moment. Leave it to Mugen to make her feel petulant. “You know. Your…you had a different word for it.”

Mugen pushed his plate aside and lit a new cigarette.

“Shouldn’t have told you that story,” he said.

Fuu’s gaze softened. “Typical,” she said, smiling sadly. She looks over the balcony and notices the gesticulations of a flamboyant middle-aged man accosting Jin at the bar.

“What do you think of the other showboat?” she asked, “You know, earlier today he sent one of his entourage to ask me out on a date. I told him I only have two real stipulations when it comes to going steady with a man. The first is that he fights his own battles. The second is that he loves the freedom of the sea. Oh, and there’s a third—he can’t be married. Really! Who does he think I am!”

“Leave it to you to scare off the guy with a sentimental line like that,”

Fuu laughed, “I’ve always gotten what I wanted before,”

Fuu takes this opportunity to look at Mugen. He’s looking at her sideways, the only way he’s ever looked at her. He’s uncharacteristically quiet on this subject. His gaze is achingly brief, then he too looks over the balcony; but the one he’s watching is Jin. Momentarily, not even for a full second, a look of pain crosses Fuu’s face. She knows, after all these years, that Mugen is still misinterpreting Jin’s proposal and, with it, Fuu’s answer. Never mind that Jin annulled the marriage as soon as Fuu was settled here at the hotel, that he went on and married the woman he had originally promised himself to. Never mind that it was never consummated.

Fuu wrings her now ringless hands. Mugen hasn’t asked, but she knows he’s noticed. A third husband, gone, and he’d been gone for four years and assumed dead for at least two. It had only been confirmed a few weeks prior, in a clinical sort of phone call. No loose ends, no tears, all perfectly solemn, respectable, and clean. And every day Fuu takes her afternoon walk in the garden, and hopes that she’ll see Mugen before the sun sets, that he’ll come back and have that look in his eyes again. He’ll tell her he’s found it—oh, what was that word again? It was one of the few secrets he ever shared with her willingly, and here she couldn’t remember.

Mabui. He’d called it mabui. She says the word out loud, causing Mugen to look at her. They don’t say anything after that. But his look tells Fuu that he hasn’t forgotten. That, probably, this is all he thinks about. He thinks about how he’s going to get his soul back in his body. How he’s going to start living like a human again. Because he’d told her something else before, but they both pretend as though he hadn’t. She remembers; she persists in remembering.

  
**A Willing Secret/A Smile of Apprehension**

It’s between Shinsuke’s death. It’s before she had met her third husband. It couldn’t have been a real moment, because it had happened at night. It’s easy to forget these sorts of encounters in the morning, to think that moonlight or the shade had colored the whole thing and ruined the fidelity of perspective, and Fuu thinks she’s being too sentimental about it still. Even so, when Mugen leaves his table that night and departs without a single change, as he always does, causing the girls to swoon as he goes by and he leers at them with empty promises, Fuu recounts the memory again:

“Eight years ago I regained my soul,” he’d told her. He’d come back to her in the aftermath of 1918, wrapped in bandages. They’d already buried Shinsuke and Fuu didn’t have any more tears. Still in mourning clothes, she couldn’t act on her impulse to touch the only part of Mugen that wasn’t damaged—to graze just two knuckles on his cheekbone. As he slumped in that wheelchair, telling her how he’d gained a soul, she realized she was never going to stop being in love with him. Just in love with his vitality, his freedom, the way he looked at her and didn’t look at her, love him to the point where his pain was her pain. She had a gift for that; she’d never considered empathy a virtue, but it had made life painfully interesting.

But she stood during this small, unexpected confession and kept her hands to herself.

“And I lost it again,” Mugen told her next. It was at this point he threw an object into the sea at their feet. A memento of the war he had fought and, in the eyes of Japan, he had deserted. Fuu knew Mugen better than that. He could say he only looked out for himself, but he finished what he started.

She is brought out of her reverie by further commotion down at the bar. There’s that weird guy again, jumping up and down and ecstatically pumping Jin’s hands, and bowing end-over-end like he’s the Emperor. At this, Fuu smiles, but it’s a smile of apprehension. If such a thing is possible.

The following day the documentary crew captures the exciting news: there’s going to be a dogfight. Not just any dogfight, the dogfight of the decade. The six or seven or eight pirate gangs(the number was always fluctuating) were already placing bets, and it came down to steep odds.

In one corner, Mugen, the Lone Bounty Hunter, the Okinawan Deserter, also known as the Red Rooster of the East China Sea.

In the other, it was none other than Jin, supposedly his best friend, once-a-rival-always-a-rival, the modern ronin, the Fish Face of Tokyo (this last nickname Jin in no way sanctioned, but it still ended up on the official roster for the event’s registration).

Mugen did not find out about this news until the documentary crew brought it up to him. His response is captured on camera:

_(At Mugen’s SECLUDED ISLAND HIDEOUT, where a single tent and a stash of ammo and soft-core girly magazines make up the only decoration. Mugen sits in his lawn chair, laughing uncontrollably. His singular commentary?)._

MUGEN: Guess it’s time to get the engine fixed.

_(MEANWHILE, the documentary crew scrambles for an actual interview with the illusive, monosyllabic Jin. The following was the only acceptable excerpt):_

INTERVIEWER: Is it true you’re fighting on behalf of a man named Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu?

JIN: Hnn.

INTERVIEWER: And what’s at stake here?

JIN: I’ve been told Fuu is at stake.

INTERVIEWER: Your ex-wife? Is getting married?

JIN: Nn.

INTERVIEWER: What made you agree to this dogfight? Was your rivalry with Mugen never resolved?

JIN: It was resolved. This challenge is something else altogether.

INTERVIEWER: Do you care to tell the viewers what that is?

JIN: Nn.

  
**Government Ties/Walk on Earth**

Mugen left the day of the announcement. It was to be his first visit to the mainland in nearly five years. A dot of red between blue sea and blue sky, his seaplane made good time—despite a brief scuffle with one of the feistier (but punier) pirate gangs, an unfortunate bank of cloud, and having to dodge the local authorities. His destination was a sleepy coastal town whose name was not disclosed but whose location wasn’t too far from Yokosuka. Having landed, Mugen waited for the cover of night before bringing his bird in for repairs at a little place called Yatsuha A.S.P.

Who exactly is Yatsuha? According to the government, the woman doesn’t even exist. Whether or not she is protected by the government, works for or outside the government, is not within the scope of this documentary. Many of Yatsuha’s interviews also had to be cut, you see. Too much censorship involved. At the cutting room floor, the following scenes were considered before they were ultimately scrapped:

_(A FIT YOUNG WOMAN is busily working on a seaplane engine, up to her elbows in oil. She answers questions with a rough and ready aplumb)._

YATSUHA: Me and Mugen? Right now, we’re just old buddies. Mm, maybe not even that. Let’s just say a bounty hunter and his mechanic. Sometimes, we’re lovers. Don’t think that’s ever gonna happen again, but at one point in time I’d pegged all my high hopes on it. They always told us at the brothel not to fall in love with customers! Oh, yeah, the brothel. I wasn’t really working at the brothel, mind. But the rest of that story is classified. Suffice it to say, that’s where Mugen and I met. It was back when he was traveling with that Jin guy and that cute little girl. _(she pauses to wipe oil from her hands)_ Mugen told me something about this competition back on the islands over yonder. Guess he and Jin are at it again.

INTERVIEWER: As a woman who’s had more than brief contact with Mugen, can you attest to his character? He’s been described as a ladies’ man.

YATUSHA ( _snorting_ ): In his dreams. Well, that’s a yes-and-no question. I mean, the guy is dripping in sex appeal. But it’s kinda subverted, yeah? He’s sorta ugly—then you realize he’s been smoldering the whole time. Like a dangerous Errol Flynn type! But as far as the whole womanizer thing…sure. Sure, there’s been lots of women in Mugen’s life. But I know a secret. There’s only ever been one broad. Huh? No, not me. You’ll have to quote _him_ on that one.

By the following week, Mugen’s seaplane is not only up to snuff—it’s improved, considerably. It’s so improved that if it’s not flown perfectly, Yatsuha warns, it could kill its pilot. Mugen grins at this warning. Then there’s the sound of the alarm. Yatsuha quickly apologizes, not to Mugen, but to the documentary team. She said she had tried to keep her government buddies out of the loop but it seems they’d seen through her ruse. Mugen’s already half-way out the hangar and it looks like the crew will be playing catch-up big time if it’s going to make it before the start of the dogfight. There he is, he’s up and at ‘em! That beautiful scarlet seaplane, now without the scuffs, is gracing the sky once again. Mugen does one unnecessary tailspin before making it safely out and over the water, keeping low so the local government planes will have a hard time aiming.

After two hours, they give up and head back towards the mainland. But Yatsuha gives the crew another exclusive:

The Japanese government doesn’t give up that easily.

  
**Hell’s Half Mile/Sympathy for the Devil**

The day of the dogfight, Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu was nervous. And when Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu experienced any sort of negative emotion, any at all—shyness or nerves or rejection—he had the amazing talent of turning this sort of dark energy on its head. This is how he won his first wife, Osen, after all. This is what brought him out to the islands, despite his terror of open water. And this is what gave him the balls to convince a documentary crew from Hollywood to show up here in the first place. Now, he’s given them what he promised: the dogfight of the decade.

What he didn’t expect was a Hollywood recruiter. A large man with exotically red hair and blue eyes was making the rounds, pumping everyone’s hands and giving his interpretor a run for his money. When the man got to Sakon, he rattled off an offer that sounded like a machine gun for how fast and precise and constant his talk was. The interpretor simply turned to Sakon and told him that Sakon would make a wonderful cameo for a bit part Mr. Titsingh was producing—but this was just the beginning—there could be promotions, supporting roles, one day, Sakon could be a “Samurai Star!” Or something like that. Then Mr. Titsingh was off.

As Sakon was now nursing dreams of stardom, he almost forgot the day’s objective. Ah, yes. He getting set to marry Fuu Kasumi. Well, perhaps marriage was a way’s off, but he’d, at the very least, win her heart. Then it was all about the long game. This was Sakon’s other underestimated talent: he was good at playing the long game. With this in mind, Sakon went off to check with his champion.

Jin’s plane fit his personality to a T. Sleek, graceful, traditional design, in a bold but still unassuming indigo blue. Jin himself looked graceful just sitting in it, and as Sakon approached, he was struck by the visage of his Lady Love in a heated argument with his ever non-plussed advocate. Sakon moseyed in at the tail-end of the conversation.

“I just don’t understand why you’re doing this!” Fuu cried, arms having gradually lifted themselves until now they hovered over her and Jin in some desperate attempt to seem larger, impassable, able to stop Jin from doing what she knew he was going to do no matter how angry or pitiful or convincing she was. Her body seemed to acknowledge this before she did, for as soon as she’d said this, her arms dropped to her sides again and she looked at Jin with a piercing expression.

Jin took only a moment to collect his thoughts. Adjusting his spectacles, he spoke so softly that Sakon almost missed it:

“It’s been years since Mugen has fought for anybody but himself,”

And Jin seemed content to leave it at that. Fuu opened her mouth to say something, then clamped it shut. She made two tiny fists, then dropped these too.

Instead she merely touched Jin on the shoulder, and told him to be careful—or else. Then she flew past Sakon before he had a chance to say anything. Her gaze was turning this way and that—searching for Mugen, Sakon knew.

“Where is he?” It was Sakon who asked this as he approached Jin’s cockpit.

“He’ll show up,” Jin said, “Probably,”

“And if he doesn’t?” Sakon said.

“That sounds like a personal problem,” said Jin, “You’ll have to figure out what to tell all the pirate captains who’ve staked the quarter’s earnings on the outcome,”

Sakon swallowed loudly at the sight of the seven or eight pirate gangs carousing about the gambling stalls. He swallowed loudly again at the whir and hiss of cameras—cameras everywhere. He had to give them all a show or else he could kiss his dreams of political stardom, Hollywood stardom, all of it goodbye! Oh, yes, and Fuu. The way his heart flutters just thinking about it! He looked up at the perfectly blue sky.

“Where is he?!” he repeated again, demanding.

As if on queue, a beautiful bolt of scarlet dashed overhead, and with it the thunder of a new and improved engine and the wind and heat of a-lot-of-miles-per-hour. Sakon covered his ears and in the whiplash nearly lost his shirt. Regaining his bearings, he swung back around to make sure he wasn’t being cheated. He was here. Mugen had finally arrived.

The crowd roared, and Sakon with them. Only Jin and Fuu looked on silently as the red seaplane came in for a landing and a very showy Mugen popped out. Even his smile was a show, Fuu thought bitterly. But when Mugen looked at her, her gaze softened. She didn’t exactly smile, but her chin tilted downward and her eyes looked straight into his. He could read her lips. Be careful, they said.

_QUICK CUT TO:_

_CUE CARD #1: From a lofty dream dreamed up in an unassuming corner of Ohio and made alive on the beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, how far planes have come! Seaplanes grace both water and sky, and would make the Wright Brothers proud! Who would have thought, here in the exotic Far East, to find their legacy thus…we present to you…._

_CUE CARD #2: The Dogfight of the Decade!!!_

_(IRIS TRANSITION to dock. On a platform are the contenders, the organizers, and the prize: Fuu Kasumi and a satchel of cash. The crowd is lively. Instead of balloons, they’re trailing streamers. There’s even a kid flying a kite that looks like a seaplane.The two contenders step up to the platform and look at each other like this is a western showdown)._

Fuu sat in the chair of honor, was provided a cushion by a blushing pirate captain, and received an unwanted wink from Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu. But she didn’t start to sweat until both Mugen and Jin stood across from each other and the crowd died down. Everyone hung on the edge of words that wouldn’t come. Jin’s expression was uncharacteristically open, revealing that he did have emotions at stake in the day’s events. Just as surprising, Mugen’s face was uncharacteristically blank. Not even a dark or heated blankness; if Fuu didn’t know better, she’d have thought Mugen was tired. Drunk? Surely not—he hadn’t been stupid enough to fly drunk in years.

Mugen wasn’t the kind to shake hands, and Jin was too traditional. Instead, Jin bowed. Mugen gave a sort of mock bow in return, but showed his real disposition in a careless flick of his fingers, a casual “I’ll-blow-you-outta-the-water-four-eyes.” Then each man turned on his heels and climbed into their respective cockpits.

The crowd roared again. And roared louder still at the sound of the planes cutting into the water like blades through grass, clean and glittering, and then they were--. 

_CUE CARD #3: Up, Up, and Away!!!_

The crowd had only a moment to suck in a breath before they resumed their cheery uproar. The day was hot, the sun was in their eyes, but nobody cared about any of that. The cameras were rolling and the crowd moved as one to watch the seaplanes loop and zoom and shift their attention back and forth and up and down. 

The bearings of a dogfight are simple, the execution harrowing, and the spectacle daunting, dizzying, _dazzling_. One gets a crick in the neck just trying to keep up with every arc and tailspin; but whenever the islanders witness just such an event, it felt to them as though they weren’t really living for anything else but the bread on their table, the family waiting for them at home, and the thrill of sky-meets-sea.

Jin’s strength was the beauty of his arc and the absolute control he had, even at high speeds. It helped, too, that he didn’t rise to bait. This didn’t stop Mugen from trying, feinting turns, showing off with tailspins, and finally flying low to the water again—leaving his engine completely exposed, taunting Jin. Fuu found her eyes narrowing and wished Mugen would actually show off something more than a parlor trick. This is how he duped low-bounty pirates, for pity’s sake! This was not how he was going to beat Jin fair and square. Jin, one of Mugen’s few equals. Complete opposites in training and in style, they nonetheless danced off one another with all the complimentary cliche of yin and yang.

 _Sorry Jin_ , Fuu winced, noticing that she was almost exclusively following the lines of scarlet in the sky. Even so, the indigo was there to compliment it. It was a thrilling first few moments—especially after one got used to the sound and the strong smell of petrol. And Mugen was flying so beautifully, his seaplane had begun to leave vapor trails.

Fuu was almost content, watching, keeping completely still, even as the crowd continued to foment around her and Sakon made a big show of biting his nails. The cameras were still whirring; Fuu had almost forgotten about them. That Mr. Titsingh was laughing up a storm. Fuu knew enough English to know he wanted to offer Mugen a contract. At this Fuu finally let out a snort of laughter. When she opened her eyes again, she was the first to notice the other planes in the far distance. She stood up abruptly, causing her chair to clatter backwards.

Jin is a close second, and, despite going through the motions of slowing down and trying to get Mugen’s attention and using flash signals to say as much, Jin can tell that Mugen had probably noticed the government planes before he did. They circle around dramatically one last time, trying to cut off the momentum they had been building. They begin to coast, parallel, and they shout at one another despite the wind catching up their voices and throwing them to the outer bounds. They give truncated directions via flash signals. Then, both nod in unison.

The crowd gasped as each plane takes off in the opposite direction. This was followed by a second wave of shock when someone, a young boy, finally made a shout about the government planes. They were close enough now they could make out the markings on the side. What followed was a bit of organized chaos, but Fuu remained standing on her platform. Somebody, probably Sakon, righted her chair, and she took it gratefully. She was still watching the sky, but her gaze was not in the direction of the military planes.

She knew where Jin was heading; his path was straight enough, noticeable enough. Well, he was probably the bait then. But with Mugen, Fuu knew only one thing for certain. His haphazard direction and ultimate plan she had no idea, but she would recognize his technique anywhere. He’d taken off in the low, narrow, jerky pattern that he liked to call ‘Hell’s Half Mile.’ If he could pull off his currently low trajectory, at speeds which she knew had increased since he’d returned from mainland with what sounded like a new engine, he’d stay alive for another half-mile and probably, probably lose the single eager pilot that had broken off from the group to trail him. But if he didn’t? If he crashed and burned out there in that rocky outcrop? The last time he had pulled this move, Mugen had told her he’d died, and he didn’t know how he’d managed to come back alive.  
  
Fuu stood up again.

“Sakon,” she said, knowing he was still near. The crowd had all but dispersed, and the military planes that hadn’t followed Jin or Mugen were just now skimming the water.

“Y-yes?” Sakon said.

“I need you to distract the military,” Fuu said, as she made her way down the platform and told one of the hotel employees present to ring up her garage and have them ready her plane and its pilot.

“Me?!” Sakon cried, incredulous.

“Yes, you,” Fuu said, impatiently, though her next words were gentle, “Shouldn’t be too tough. You’re going to be the Prime Minister of Japan one day, might as well start practicing your diplomacy,”  
  
And with that she was off, and Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu fell in love all over again. But he saw her gaze had never really left that place where sea and sky meet. In fact, the poet in Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu’s busy brain might have summed her sentiments thus: he could see a red plane haunting Fuu’s eyes, could see it flying low and steady there.

So, as Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu turned on his heels, he remembered that he had someone haunting his eyes too. Ah, Osen! None of this would have happened if she hadn’t told him he’d never be Prime Minister of Japan, that he should just be content that he had a loving wife and five children and a steady job and the like. Well, Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu doesn’t give up that easily! But he can adjust. As he walked authoritatively towards the officers now standing at the dock, he dreamed of his days as Prime Minister, and how proud he’ll be to have Osen on his arm, and she’ll be telling him he was right all along.  
  
“Good luck you crazy devil,” Sakon said to the vapor trail slowly fading out over the water.

  
**Seven Minutes in Heaven/Walk on Fire**

_(QUICK CUT to ocean speeding away below. Mugen’s seaplane makes a great contrast between the billowing waves below and the clouds above. Rocks and the hints of coral reefs are precipitously close)._

All of Mugen’s concentration is focused between two points of contact: his hands wrapped around the yoke and his eyeballs bugging out to nearly touch his goggles. Here, right here on the edge of life and death, Mugen no longer feels totally alive. At one point, this had been different, this had been what he lived for, what he craved, like a dog to its bone, but—no time, he cuts around a sudden jut of rock and the adrenaline ricochets around his ribcage.

There is the memory of fire. The longest half-mile of Mugen’s life. Heaven like clouds reflected on water.

He pulls again; another close call. In the rear view mirror, a single plane is tailing him. Is it the memory playing with his mind, a mirage of exhaustion? The quick answer comes by way of a very real burst of gunfire as it lands in the water and pops off bits of rock, and generally covers everything but the back of Mugen’s seaplane. But this, only barely.

Ok, maybe he still did kick out of this. Another glance in the mirror tells Mugen that his guy is nearly as reckless as he is. The military seaplane is running closer to the water, and Mugen knows in less than ten seconds he’ll be in line of sight to shoot—not at Mugen’s engine, which would be bad enough, but straight at the cockpit. There’s few options. Mugen veers left, or right, or goes straight towards that upcoming rock.

There’s a thought that crosses Mugen’s mind in those ten seconds, incidentally the last stretch of Hell’s Half Mile. It’s his last lucid thought before the shrapnel and the sudden spill of memories. A strangely wordy thought. Or just a word, rather.

 _**Mabui.** _  
_**Essence of self. Transferable by contact, clinging to the living and the dead. A person can lose his mabui even while living, but it can be regained. Just as the soul is immortal, so is mabui.** _

_(Mugen chooses the rock)._

_CUE CARD #4: BOOM!!!_

_FADE TO WHITE._

_SLOW FADE TO MEMORY._

Memory of war, of the seven minutes in heaven when he had faced his ancestors and begged for life and come to find out when he was returned to his squadron he was the only one alive. Memory of the road, memory of rivalry, friendship, lust, hunger, poverty, biting, conniving, surviving. Memory of dying before, memory of a bird without flight, memory of learning to fly, memory of a foreign bird, memory of a foreign flower.

It’s not the memory of the War that haunts him now, nor even the memory of his ancestors waiting for him in some upside-down oceanic paradise, or the memory of Yatsuha’s body, or the memory of Jin’s eyes when he told him he didn’t want either of them to die. The time line didn’t matter at that moment. All that mattered was the fire, the fire he’d lost, and how he was going to get it back. He’d walked on earth _and_ fire _and_ water, trying to claw his way to the knowledge that he was alive and he had a soul and it wasn’t damned.

So it was her memory that haunted him in those moments, and her memory that brought him back. Not like she saved him; not like she could. Mugen was the last person to put that kind of responsibility on anyone, even himself. But he did take credit for shaking himself out of the daze of the explosion and the memories it shook up, and into the reality of his body, bruised but mostly unbroken, floating in the water midst the large strewn pieces of his and the military pilot’s aircraft. His goggles were twisted diagonally down his face, and he blinked back the sun. This brought him to the memory of sunflowers, and he thought of Fuu, and he wondered at the weight that now clamped his chest. Was surprised to find it had been there now for a very long time and he just hadn’t noticed its return.

When Fuu’s plane found them minutes later, Mugen asked her what had taken so long. He enjoyed the sound of her voice, though he couldn’t remember if she had taken on an angry or gentle tone. She had the talent of being able to administer both at the same time. In either case, he lost himself in it, and succumbed to a long-awaited rest that had been dogging him since 1918.

**An Epilogue (Of Sorts)**

Contrary to urban myth, Mugen did not die the day of the dogfight. But it was a convenient lie to keep telling, because it made the government spies and surveillance and military threat finally disappear.

The documentary crew departed a few days after the sloppy conclusions; there was no determined winner, though the twist with the military and the tragic death at the end did give a sort of pomp and tragedy to the piece. It was a documentary darling for a solid 3 1/2 weeks back in the States. Mr. Titsingh passed out contracts to almost everyone on the island, and Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu did get his cameo, though he never got anywhere near a “Samurai Star.” Mr. Titsingh lamented that he was just too ahead of his time; that Hollywood wasn’t ready to accept Japanese stars alongside their Errol Flynns and their Lillian Gishs, just yet. This didn’t stop him from using stock footage from the documentary, including Mugen’s signature tail spins and the beginning of his Hell’s Half Mile, in several of his aviation action flicks. Mugen became famous without a credit to his name.

As for the other half of Sakon Shogen Nagamitu’s story, while he never became Prime Minister of Japan, he did play a very important role in the local government of the town that his wife and five children happily grew old in, and he always had the warm and happy memory of the day he had stood up to the Japanese military and they had actually listened to him.  
  
Jin, because of his noble heritage and service in the War, got off with a light warning from the authorities. After the dogfight, Fuu came to thank him for agreeing to it in the first place. The conversation took place in Fuu’s gazebo, in the zen garden with the British roses, as they discussed Mugen’s recovery. Not only the recovery of his body, but what seemed to be the recovery of his grasp on life. He was still the same old loud-mouthed bounty hunter, but there was more weight to him. Less empty promise.

And so Jin and Mugen went on to do the occasional aviation show, usually at festivals, almost always for money (on Mugen’s part), and they brokered peace whenever the occasional silly pirate gang war broke out. Jin and his wife, Shino, after years of doubt and complication, finally spent the remaining years of their life on the island raising their twin sons, to whom Fuu was named godmother.

And what about Fuu herself, Fuu and her long-standing bet?

Well, you’d have to quote _her_ on that.

—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wikipedia article on mabui:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_religion#Mabui
> 
> Character References from the Show:  
> Mr. Titsingh - Ep. 6 (as Jouji/Isaac Titsingh--and yeah, he was Dutch, but let's just remain fuzzy on the details, shall we?)  
> Shinsuke - Ep. 7  
> Sakon Shogen Nagamitsu + Osen - Ep. 8  
> Yatsuha - Ep. 15
> 
> And let's give credit to the song's theme song for not-so-subtly being used near the end of the story. ;-)


	12. Tomboy in the Snow (Winter)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All italics are excerpts from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem, “Home.”

**_—home was childhood’s telescope_ **

  
The stone lanterns were covered in straw; the men had clothed the trees and the bushes, too. One of the old women had laughed when Fuu began bundling up her sunflowers, then compassionately helped Fuu to cut and dry some for the upcoming cold. The girl said three would do.

Over the course of four and a half days, Fuu watched her sunflower fields dissappear into the white and the frost turn to layers of snow so thick that men came to shovel out tunnels to and from the village road. On the fourth day, Fuu found herself climbing up on top of the snow, and she could see nothing but treeless, flowerless, bushless white as far as the eyes could see. In the winters when she was a child, and an only child at that, as alone as she was even now, she used to pretend she was a giant in the snowy uppermost parts of Mount Fuji. Now Fuu found herself standing on top of the world and peering out, searching. 

She tripped over a sword at the entrance of her family’s house. At the end of autumn she had found it full of squatters and dust. So she occupied only half of the house, like a ghost. The other half she would need to replace entirely, lost as it was to piss stains and uncareful fires and the general touch of time. 

The fall from the sword had caused her to plunge head-first into the abandoned side of the building. More precisely, she fell through the shoji and ended in a pile of splintered wood and bruises. She landed on a warm, sharp jumble of bones.

On the fourth day, Mugen’s ghost had stopped by.

Fuu forced Mugen to sleep in the crappy part of the house. It was her right. After exchanging a painful amount of information by eye contact alone—darts, complaints, a-has!, questions—they got to the business of dinner and a fire.

“So this is where you grew up?” Mugen asked, on his haunches and hunched over in a way that Fuu didn’t like. Because it looked like Mugen had been through the wringer since she had last seen him on the docks of Nagasaki. He was hunched into himself and looked skinnier than ever; he could have used his elbows as knives. But the other thing that made Fuu’s skin crawl was the fact that Mugen had even asked such a personal question. Since when did he care about stuff like that?

She asked this question out loud, but her tone was far from accusatory. It was amused, even gentle. She had to be gentle with him, after the verbal tirade she’d given him over his manners just the hour before. She was one to talk. The question brought back memories of just exactly the kind of child she had been within these walls. Instead of waiting for him to answer, Fuu gave him hers:

“It used to be a lot more empty,” she traced her finger along the dust she could never seem to keep completely at bay, “We always had to keep it so clean, especially after mom got sick. Anything could have been making her sick, you know? I used to run through here screaming about the tangles in my hair. You can’t see them now, but in the summer, our entire backyard was nothing but sunflowers,”

He was silent, with a gaze that looked like he was trying to divine some kind of meaning out of the clumps of rice at the bottom of his bowl. It was invitation enough for Fuu to continue.

She asked, “What’s the matter with you?”

He looked at her. “Ever had the piss freeze on your own leg before?”

Her look showed she was not impressed by his ribaldry. He could actually feel the high-born word, ribaldry, and that he didn’t understand it. He didn’t completely understand the language of women, what the twitch in the eyebrow meant or the shade of the eyes or how they managed the subtleties at all. A twist of the hips, of the wrist, that was a little easier to understand. He sighed.

“I haven’t slept for four days, that’s what’s wrong,”

“That explains why you were careless enough to leave my dad’s sword in the middle of the entryway,”

The sword had been placed like a hedge between them. A sign of chivalry, in some countries.

They both were freezing. They both were bored. So Fuu found childhood stories spilling out of her. There’s a great big silence that winter likes to point out, and Fuu had been lonely with it since the autumn had passed. Probably since she had left Mugen in Nagasaki, in fact.

Fuu told him about the strays she used to name, and bury when she found them limp in the cold or the heat. Perhaps the blizzard outside had brought that bittersweet memory upon her. But no, as she continued to tell her stories, she realized that her childhood was simply more bittersweet when she said it out loud. It had always been kissed by the nicer things in life: a samurai’s house, the shade of sunflowers, her mother’s beauty. Tea. She talked a lot about tea. They ended up deciding to boil tea. No Mugen, don’t add kindling to the fire. They’re not supposed to come to a large, violent boil—we just need the bubbles to barely rise. Yes, this will improve the flavor. And when they settled with scalding cups of tea, Fuu told Mugen about the time she had to get the midwife to stitch up her head because she ran in front of the horse that was delivering news from the daimyo. “It wasn’t even interesting news.” She told him about the time she outran an entire colony of bees after she’d attempted to steal their honeycomb.

“That was after mom died,” Fuu said, though her tone was more dreamy, more reflective than anything else, “That was before Aunty and Uncle. I’d never known a person could feel so hungry,”

Fuu turned to look at Mugen. It had grown darker in the house; it was night, winter night, outside. Mugen’s eyes were closed but Fuu had long ago distinguished between his real sleep and his fake sleep. He was faking it. And she knew she should let him have this, his well-deserved rest, but she sat in the silence for a minute, and the silence felt so big, after she had filled it with so much talk, that she needed some reassurance. Just a little assurance. She touched Mugen’s elbow, the one that could have cut her to pieces.

His eyes sprang open like a trap. Fuu blinked in surprise, but unlike most people, she wasn’t scared of Mugen. He knew that. It was a fact that caused him to relax.

“I’ma sleep,” he said. It was Mugen’s way of being courteous.

 

 

  
**_—home was feeling’s skin_**

 

The next day the blizzard had passed and Mugen began working on the wall near the entrance. He tore down what was broken and replaced it with another screen in an unused room. Fuu took note of Mugen’s hidden skills: the way he measured with his eyes, the way he swung a hammer like he could do it in his sleep, the subtle changes he made to the house throughout his back-and-forth shuffling. You might have guessed Mugen cared about appearances.

Fuu just couldn’t stop watching him.

She caught his hand, during an exchange of soup bowls. She found that she had spent the majority of the day cooking. It was chore enough, even without the complications of winter, to go water fetching and starting the fire and the washing the rice and having to chop vegetables with cracked, freezing fingers. Fuu’s own hands were uncharacteristically rough when she touched Mugen’s palm. His calluses warmed her.

Fuu wished she were married. She was at that age. She liked the idea of sleeping next to someone. Cooking for more than one person. Sharing a fire, sharing the stars. Divvying up chores. She liked the idea of children, too. She liked the idea of sewing clothes for her family, of taking family trips, of having someone touch her hand, her ankle, her neck.

She’d hardly known Mugen was doing it till he reached her cheekbone. Then her eyes darted to his, which were closed in a grimace. She studied the hard corners of his mouth. She suddenly felt the ghost of his fingertips as they’d been: he had touched her palm, her ankle, her neck, now her face. He looked embarrassed. Fuu felt like she should do something.

“Hey Mugen,” she said, “Would you think about marrying me in the spring?”

Well, that got the grimace to disappear. He stared at a spot over her shoulder for at least thirty seconds.

“What about Nagasaki?” he asked.

“Nothing happened in Nagasaki,”

Mugen grunted, “Exactly,”

Fuu cleared her throat. “I—I didn’t think it was appropriate. The appropriate time, y’know,” She suddenly looked up at him, “I still told you where to find me. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

He closed his eyes again, but this time there wasn’t a hard edge to him. He laughed. He was laughing at Fuu, and that annoyed her to no end, but she found herself leaning forward and torturing herself with hope.

When he was finished, he looked at her again, and when his eyes sprang this time and pinned her, she knew she was in trouble. He continued where he’d left off. In one swift movement his hand felt like it dipped into her spine like a boat settling in a river. A strange and not unwelcome sensation, if Fuu was being honest. He held her by the scruff of her neck and kissed her. His lips were soft and his teeth were hard. Then pulled back in surprise.

“You actually taste like honey,”

He leaned back on one arm and looked at her.

“I might make it back here in the spring,” he said. Then he turned around, picked up his bowl of soup, gulped in one fell swoop, and turned himself over into a very real, very deep sleep.

 

 

**_——a home above the year’s seasons_ **

 

Before Mugen left for that winter, Fuu took him up in the pre-dawn blue so they could walk the world as giants. It took a few moments before Mugen could actually trust that the snow would hold him up, and then from their perch they watched the sun rise. They stood a while longer, looking down at their house, and Mugen made suggestions about the roof and where to put a chicken coop and telling her what kind of food and quantity of sake he enjoyed. She asked what he would do for a living that would pay for all this food. To her surprise, he asked what she would suggest. I’m not attracted to men who can’t make up their own minds, she told him. He threw a snowball down her kimono for that, and then told her he would pimp himself out—how would she like that? In the end, he ended up settling on shipwright. Fuu was only half-surprised that he would know how to build ships. She told him they weren’t terribly close to the ocean. He said lakes and rivers would do for now.

She kissed him this time.

“You taste like winter,” she told him, surprised herself, “Who would’ve guessed?”

“What the hell tastes like winter?”

“Here,” She took up a handful of cold snow, and it melted quickly in her hand. She gestured for him to drink it. He did so, then gave her a devilish look before nipping her palm. When she went to hit him he dodged and swung her over his shoulder and he spun her around until they both fell and got to where they were starting to feel frozen solid.

“Let’s go home,” Fuu said. Mugen agreed.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not my favorite, largely plotless, not exactly what I planned. But a long time coming. Any comments and kudos are appreciated. Thanks for reading!


	13. Beast of Burden

 

 **I'll tell you you can put me out on the street**  
**Put me out with no shoes on my feet**  
**But, put me out, put me out**  
**Put me out of misery**

 

 

Marriage was not the most obvious option. It did solve the fact that both of them were lonely and that he was casteless. The piece of paper cementing the facts got lost in the rainy season all the same.

They traveled with straw capes and straw hats, the rain trickling cold through them. Every night there was an unspoken question. Neither knew who should be the one to answer. He teased her one night by slipping a hand through her yukata and grazing her thigh. She had flinched.

When he touched her, she felt fifteen again and she’d _hated_ being fifteen.

“C’mere,” he said, in that half-gentle way he’d learned to use with her.

Which of course meant he followed with, “You’re still just some lonely brat waiting to be kissed,”

She makes to strangle him, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning too hard. Of course, putting her arms around his neck has the pleasant effect of drawing him closer. She knows, strange reality that it is, that Mugen has been waiting for her invitation all this time. This was probably the tenth time he’d initiated any kind of contact—but he’d always been stopped short. She _did_ want to be kissed.

Mugen kissed like a boy. Like it was his first time. Was there no in-between, his biting her lower lip and kissing her breathless, and this? Gentle, child-like, trying to catch a firefly without clipping its wings.

*

_“Do men even fall in love?”_

_Jin was the only person who could answer that question; the only person Fuu would even think of asking. It was Jin, after all, who had suggested that Fuu and Mugen get married. Only after he had suggested that Fuu marry Jin himself. She’d had to remind Jin of Shino. In fact, she’d accused Jin of not really loving any woman his entire life. The whole proposal had unnerved her, to say the least._

_Jin dismissed the accusations with a sigh._

_“Of course they do,” he answered._

_Fuu, more cautiously, apologetically, “How do they know?”_

_Jin had glanced at Mugen hacking away at something in the distance. Their reunion was destined to be brief and decisive._

_“You walk around, feeling satisfied,” Jin said, “She makes you trust yourself,”_

_Jin looked her straight in the eye._

_“You make Mugen trust himself, you know,”_

*

Come toward me. A tilt, and their gravity was the same. Ah! Drawing in Mugen’s strength, sheltering his litheness, drinking up his fever. He kept looking at her, a view not to be missed. She was peaks and valleys and a river leading to an ocean, too. She attempted to cradle his face and her thumb got caught between his teeth; he bit it gently before guiding her hand through his hair.

Milky light through the rice paper. Sweet nothings in her ear: sugar, goya, barley. All the things he’d been starved of.

And all this with the knowledge that he had loved her before making love to her. That this was a gift, and it could be given again. An ongoing decision: keep going, like that, like that, like that. It was her own mantra. She discovered pet names for him along the way, too: red, and peasant (he seemed to really like it when she called him that, her in her high fancy silks), and, of course, samurai.

A cry. Not quite her relief, but so measurably wonderful. His collapse, the way he tries to nonchalantly turn it into a way for him to hold her. Even here, in this shared privacy, he needed to protect his pride.

“I’m your wife,” It startles her as much as it startles him. It’s their first time holding a gaze for more than a few seconds at a time. Fuu recalls another truth.

_“Men can use their whole body, but they can’t love you without looking you in the eye,”_

Mugen looks into her eyes long enough that what he says next bursts out like an ill-kept secret:

“Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do that?” He eyes her neck as his teeth grazed against her jaw, “Your skinny little throat could send me inna coma,”

“Beastly,” Fuu said—and was promptly kissed for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been struggling to write a more physical description of Mugen and Fuu's relationship. Because Mugen is a physical guy. It makes sense. But I'm anti-p*rn, so I had to find a way to make it work on some other level. Well, it was an interesting writing exercise! Lyrics are from the Rolling Stones, of course. ;-)


	14. Shut Up and Shut Your Eyes

There was a chip in the tea cup at breakfast. Mud had washed over the roads the night before; they had to take the long way around through mosquitoes the size of monkeys and then lost their lunch in a landslide. Some beggar called her pinch-faced after she’d rolled her ankle on an acorn (he refused to carry her until he was absolutely sure she wasn’t just milking it). They shared half a fish for dinner. And even after sunset it was hot as balls outside.

In all this, she didn’t complain. No, not when there were strangers to moan at and the sky to curse and rocks to kick. Fuu saved all the day’s anger for that night, when Mugen was finally ready to catch some Z’s.

He’d spread out his arms and legs wide and taken one satisfying gulp of air when she suddenly started _sobbing_.

He tried to ignore it for a while, but she wouldn’t let up. He finally opened his eyes and glared at her.

“Girl,” he said, and continued when he saw that he’d gotten her attention, “Want to know how to feel better?”

She blinked.

“One,” Mugen said, “Shut your eyes. Ok, good. Now two. Shut up.”

She opens her eyes. “Really!”

“You feel bad, huh?” Mugen got up on one elbow, “What’s crying gonna do about it?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Fuu said, “A girl feels different than a guy,”

“Huh,” Mugen scratched his crotch, “If you say so,”

“I just—I just do it for the relief,”

“Ok,”

They kind of left it at that—there was a silence, almost awkward, but not quite there.

“See, I told ya,” Mugen said.

“What?”

“Shutting up made you feel better,”

She gets close enough to punch him. It occurs to him that he could scoop her up in his arms, wrap himself around her. It would be so easy. She wanted it too. Probably.

Her hand _does_ pause on his chest. His heart kicks it up a notch. Dammit.

“You okay?” she asks him, and of course it’s a whisper, which is cute as hell.

“It always beats that fast,” It’s a half-lie—he’d never had the nice, steady pulse of someone who would live long.

“Mugen,” She’s the only person who has ever said his name and made it sound like an everyday thing; y’know, _real_. “When was the last time you cried?”

He snorts.

“Thought so,”

Now she closes her eyes and lies down beside him.

“Hey, I’m not hogging _your_ sleeping space,”

“You said closing my eyes would make me feel better,”

“Go close them over there,”

“Mugen, what do you do to feel better?”

“I don’t feel,”

She snorts; it turns into real laughter.

“Can we please just go the hell to sleep?”

“Alright, fine. Lay down,”

He’s not sure why, but he obeys. No, the word ‘obey’ doesn’t leave a nice taste in his mouth. He just decides that’s what he wants to do, lay down beside Fuu. Maybe when she’s asleep he’ll cup a feel.

“Okay,” she says, and he suppresses a shiver because he didn’t expect her to sound so close, “Now take your own advice,”

“What now?”

“Your own advice. Shut up and shut your eyes.”

Again, he does so because he wants to. She’s quiet a while. There’s a different feel, with someone sleeping beside you. The sound of their breath changes. They have a name for it in his language; they don’t have it here. _Niichi._

“Ever feel like something is chasing you?” Fuu asks suddenly.

“Hey now, I was just starting to like you,” He opens his eyes and is blinded by the stars. He hadn’t really noticed them before. “Sure, I know that feeling. Like something’s trying to gnaw at your heels,”

“That’s why,” Fuu is whispering again and he loves it, “That’s why I was crying. All day it’s like I’ve been trying to outrun this terrible feeling,”

“Nice sob story,” he said. She ribs him, playfully.

“C’mon, I think we’re pretty good at putting up with each other. I feel better with you here. Even if you’re terrible at actually trying to make me feel better,”

“Who said I was trying?”

“Guess you don’t have to,”

His heart actually skipped a beat; what kind of sentimental crap was this? What was she _doing_ to him?

“Just do me a favor and don’t bitch in your sleep,” he said, turning over, half-hoping she’d place her warmth all up and down his back. But she doesn’t. They’re still not on the same wavelength. In fact, he’s still not entirely sure if he understands where she’s coming from half the time. But he’s been chased around long enough to know they both suffer from the same basic thing.

And that’s saying something.

Her breathing eventually puts him to sleep, as good as a lullaby he still recalls in his dreams now and again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by "Lullaby" by Loudon Wainwright III.


	15. Braid

She mends his bones. He braids her hair.

It’s the only way she touches him. It’s the only way he’s allowed to touch her.

Her hair is getting longer. So is his. But then he’ll take a knife and cut it. Hack away at his face till there’s just an attempt at a mustache and then hack away at his hair till there’s just a wild, angry patch. She’s soft in comparison. Her skin is soft. Her hair. He’s getting good at braiding it. It’s a nightly ritual now, like sharpening his blade and jacking off. Kinda makes him feel more human.

It’s weird. She’s not a thrill he’s chasing. He’s not going in for the kill. This is so damn slow for him. But there’s slowly less and less of a space in his memory that doesn’t contain her, and he doesn’t want to scare her off. He doesn’t want to lose her, cause she makes a pretty good compass. They’re getting tied up, three strands and shit, him and her and the road. It all makes sense together and without one or the other it all falls apart.

And so, like some kinda sissy, he longs for that moment when his blood-stained dirt-encrusted fingernails can run like through her hair like a sinner running through a shrine. That’s thrill enough. Like he’s doing wrong, but like he’s getting clean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comin' up on flash fiction again. Didn't go for a specific word count here, just wanted to stop short. 
> 
> I always feel the need to apologize for Mugen's mouth. What can you do with a drunken sailor, eh?


	16. Shirumii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longer Version Of These Notes At The End: Dark themes, blood, language. Since this was a writing exercise, many lines and much of the structure are lifted whole-sale from Flannery O'Connor's "The Turkey." I don't deny this and obvs have no kind of claim on either Samurai Champloo or O'Connor's body of work. Credit where credit is due; the lines that are 100% O'Connor are in italics (with only place and name changes).

_His eyes glinted_ , cooked egg white, in the island heat. Pinned by a stray leap of sun through the trees he’d marked for a hollow place to hide, the boy pawed for the slingshot and soapnuts he’d left in the ribs of the tree. A few of the nuts, and a tiny dry skull, spilled within kicking distance. And Mugen kicked that skull far enough that it disturbed a bush, which in turn disturbed the Cock.

Cock was different from all the other roosters on the island. Mean and leathery, absolutely deserving of his name, bald in some places where the black feathers gave way to skin covered in other animals’ blood. Cock was bigger than any rooster had a right to be, and lumbered around at night eating its young and nursing its limp. Cock had lost one wing already. The only time he’d ever been caught. And Mukuro, who’d been the one who managed to pin it for little under an hour, said he’d never tasted anything so putrid as that old bastard’s right wing.

But Mugen was going to be known as the one who killed and ate that whole damn bird.

 _“You crazy chicken,” Mugen muttered, “You can’t fly._ I’ve already got your taste in my mouth,”

Mugen didn’t care what food tasted like. Food was food. He was twelve-years-old and could hide behind a straw of wheat.

The rooster had an exceptionally long neck and bobbed it back and forth. Moved it more than was necessary, because even though he had both eyes, they were clouded with age. His hearing was pretty good, though. Mugen was drawing it in a wide circle, and Cock still heard when Mugen took a slight intake of breath. Damn root had been sticking out in the wrong place.

Mugen gave chase. He knew this part of the island as good as Cock now. He’d been camping out here for upwards of ten days; he’d begun to lose track of time, not that he ever really kept track of it in the first place. All this time the boy hadn’t even bothered to bathe, even with the ocean that close. He wanted to smell like the earth and the heat and the piss. Sure, chickens weren’t known for their sense of smell—but other things were. There were things to be more frightened of in this part of the island than a crazy old Cock.

When the boy got near enough to pounce, near enough to just scoop it up, _the thing shot off in a heavy speed that made Mugen start_. _He tore after it, straight out in the open for a half plot of dead grass; then it went under an upraised root and into some woods again and Mugen had to get on his hands and knees to crawl underneath the root._ Roots—they seemed everywhere now, grabby as hands, which made the trees start to look human, or more than human, like faces in the night but it was still broad daylight. It suddenly occurred to Mugen that if it rained he was done for. The dirt and the sweat and the smell on him was a totem against all the bad luck he’d stored up since the day he was born. He couldn’t it shed it clean now. Catching the rooster was going to change things. That meat would make his skinny body strong; he’d use the bones for toothpicks, then he’d grind those up into dust and drink to that too. He’d get drunk on chicken blood and start howling at the moon, and the moon would come down and make love to him and tell him he was a real man.

Mugen was twelve-years-old and could hide behind a straw of wheat.

 _He was going to have it. He saw it dart through a thicket and he headed for the thicket and when he got there it darted out again and in a second disappeared under a hedge. He went through the hedge fast and heard his haori rip and could feel cool streaks on his arms where they were getting scratched._ He didn’t stop; his clothes were already ruins, and Cock was _only a little ahead of him and Mugen could see it go over the edge of the hill and down again into an open space and he darted to._

They’d be in an uproar when he came back with that rooster in his arms; they’d go to bed talking about him.

Cock was heading for a ditch. The roots were still hard to miss, but Mugen started to ignore the ache in his side. Blood coursed everywhere through him, fast and too much, but he outdid the sensation with his breathing. He just kept breathing deeply. He thought about jumping higher and pumping his arms more sporadically and once he even hovered in the air for just a moment, just on the virtue of his strength and speed, and he looked evilly at Cock, who was beginning to falter, go breathless. I don’t even got wings and I can fly, you ugly sonovabitch.

Then he tripped over a root and the soapnuts fell from the bag at his hip and he got a large splinter up near his thumb from grasping his slingshot the wrong way. When he got up, the rooster was out of sight.

“I’ll follow him this way,” he said to no one. But he guessed right.

Not a stone’s throw away. The rooster lay almost its entire weight on his stupidly long neck, panting. _Mugen had to stop at the hedge near the ditch to catch his breath, but he could watch the rooster with its whole body moving up and down with the panting. He could see the tip of its tongue going up and down in its opened bill. Mugen pushed up closer to the hedge and eased his hand through and then gripped_ the rooster quickly around its black, oily, mangy tail.

 _There was no movement from the other side._ Maybe Cock had dropped dead. _Mugen put his face close to the leaves that blocked them, tried to look through. He pushed the twigs aside with one hand but they would not stay. He let go of the rooster and pulled his other hand through to hold the leaves. Through the hole he made, he saw the bird wobbling off drunkenly. He ran back to where the hedge began and got on the other side. He’d get it yet._ It wasn’t so smart.

It limped and dashed across the middle of the field and toward the woods again. And Mugen heard a roll of thunder. It couldn’t rain! He’d never get it! _Mugen dashed behind it, keeping his eyes sharp on it until suddenly something hit his chest and knocked the breath black out of him. He fell back on the ground and forgot the rooster for the cutting in his chest. He lay there for a while with things rocking on either side of him. Finally he sat up. He was facing the tree he had run into. He rubbed his hands over his face and arms and the long scratches began to sting. He would have taken it in slung over his shoulder and they would have jumped up and shouted,_ “Aye, it’s Mugen! Look at Mugen! Look at the bird! It’s the rooster, it’s the Cock, Mugen’s done it!”

Mugen kicked something away with his foot. _He’d never see the rooster now. He wondered why he had seen it in the first place, heard about it at all, if he wasn’t going to be able to get it._ The thunder and its gods, and the moon and her perfect breasts, or somebody somewhere more significant than Mugen had played a dirty trick on him. _All that running for nothing._ Now he couldn’t be any better than Mukuro. He’d just be a plain sort of rotten like Mukuro. A kind of bad that even the gods ignored.

Mugen stuck a knife he hadn’t planned on using into the tree that had knocked him out. He worked at the wood over and over. So what if he couldn’t kill a chicken? Mugen bet he could steal. Could be a jewel thief. Could get fat off of mangoes. He could learn how to toss knives. He could start brawls and finish them. Those are all things he could do. He could already curse, and he’d made this slingshot, and he wasn’t half-bad with a blade, and he didn’t let Mukuro intimidate him. So what if he didn’t drink chicken’s blood and bring home the bones?

He could hear something now; he started.

 _The rooster rolled over at the edge of a thicket._ The evil old legend suddenly seemed bigger; that rooster with his piebald body and feathers dark with old blood. Dead. It seemed even bigger now that it was dead. Mugen had chased him dead.

Aye, Mugen! It’s a huge bird! You’re a boy and you’re the one who killed that mean old evil-eyed rooster!

Mugen lifted the Cock’s last good wing. Fresh blood. From what animal? Maybe a boar. Maybe from the skull that Mugen had kicked.

Another roll of thunder. And the thought of a wild boar. Mugen scooped up the chicken in his arms. It smelled really bad, was starting to smell like death on top of it. But soon the moon would be out and would be looking for him, and the moon had something to do with the rain, and he was the boy who had seen the rooster die, so maybe he’d be alright. Maybe he was supposed to be alright. He felt like the universe had some confidence in him, maybe even some purpose for him, so he had confidence in himself. The real kind, not the show-off spit-off-a-ledge kind.

Mugen felt something, but he wasn’t sure what. Maybe that a legend like the Cock deserved a little dignity—death by perfect slingshot to the forehead.

The thunder followed them. A rustle in the bushes followed them. But he was fine now, more fine than he’d been an hour ago, more fine than he’d been ten days ago. He knew how things were. He knew how the gods favored him.

He kept thinking about the rooster lying on its neck. Then a drop of rain scalded his cheek, right on the cheekbone where the skin was thinnest.

Mugen’s heart started to go very fast, even without him moving at all. He took off at a run. He could feel all the organs in the rooster’s body moving up and down, feel its limp neck spin in weird circles. And he couldn’t see the roots anymore. He tripped, separating him and the rooster, clawing up skin on his elbow till it looked pale and pink like dead chicken’s skin. They say that heaven is a root that leads to everything. The heavens hated Mugen. He’d been waiting for confirmation.

He got up. Every sensation passed through him sharply and then faded: the scratches on his arms, the pink flesh of his elbow, and now the rain slicing new paths through his outer skin. _He ran faster and faster. His heart was running as fast as his legs and he was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch._ No, it had four heavy hooves and two thick tusks and small white eyes mad a madman’s under a full blood moon. It had a roar like thunder in its throat. It wanted Mugen’s right arm; it was going to eat Mugen’s bony, leathery right arm and tell him how disgusting it tasted. Mugen would walk around the rest of his life in a limp, and die from a gash in his side, or an old injury, panting on his neck, tossed over a root and into a ditch.

Then for one moment, strength and speed obeyed him, and he flew. He hung suspended in the air, with both arms intact, and flew.

He landed on the other side of the upraised root and whatever was following him stopped as at some holy barrier. The sun was setting behind some of the storm clouds, which probably wouldn’t break till morning. And after ten days, Mugen emerged from the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Mitsugu Sakihara's "Okinawan-English Wordbook":
> 
> Shirumi - the white of an egg  
> Shirumii - the white of an eye  
> \--  
> \--  
> There’s something about Flannery O’Connor’s “The Turkey” that makes me feel so sad. Not in a good or a clean way, but not in the worse way either. It’s about the weird nature of innocence. Kids, wild animals—there’s an innocence about them, but innocence ain’t no virtue. 
> 
> So what I did here was, as an absolute true and shameless confession, copy O’Connor’s “The Turkey.” I started by typing it word for word, just changing out the names and the setting place words. Heard this was a good exercise, just copying out professional short stories to get the flow. Then I went back and made it less plagiarized. Let it run in places. Shortened it up. But I don’t claim to be the original. Many of the lines and phrases are complete whole-sale O’Connor. I've decided to italicize the lines that are completely hers, however distracting that may be. Even then, many of her story decisions and the overall structure are still the bones of this story. Her story goes on in much more depth and has slightly different themes and I can’t recommend it enough. This is just fanfiction, homage, writing practice, and you owe it to yourself to support Samurai Champloo and Flannery O’Connor if it behooves you to. 
> 
> Mugen’s a dark character—I did my due diligence to give him a sailor’s vocab, a troubled childhood, and some dark fantasies. Needless to say, none of those are things I endorse—like O’Connor, I just think it’s important to be honest about a character’s, well, character.


	17. Pirate on Cassette (1989, Revisited)

It’s a 1967 Datsun they are driving and, theoretically, they shouldn’t be driving it. It’s 1989, for one, and the Datsun was really never supposed to be anything more than cute. Durability wasn’t exactly it’s thing. Still, it was cheaper, in the long run, than the train, and it made it harder for the government goons to track them. Fuu liked to count her blessings.

Jin was asleep in the back, glasses keeping his ungodly long hair out of his eyes. Fuu keeps peeking at him in the rear view mirror. She can’t explain it. She just likes looking at him. He’s beautiful; more beautiful than she is, and she can say that without bitterness. She’s just getting out of her chipmunk years, and she keeps pinching her cheeks to get them to a desired womanly slope with prominent cheekbones. But even Jin’s hair is longer than hers; yeah, its weird, alright. Jin is totally out of place—the old world mannerisms, the long ponytail, the clipped speech. She liked to play a game with him, just to see how many times he would refuse her offerings of gum or vending machine coffee or a ride in the passenger seat. Every time, without fail, she could put down a tally for his expected response: “Kekkon desu.” Geez, he was a perfect samurai—he’d just come a few centuries too late.

Lately Mugen had been in on it too. The tally game. It’s one of the only things that Mugen will laugh at that’s not some lurky pervert joke or a snide comment at Fuu’s expense. It’s times like these, the inside jokes, or the sleepy drives when the Datsun isn’t falling apart, that Fuu keeps to herself. It makes her feel alive.

Mugen tinkers with the radio. Signal sucks. What does come through is ama music which he quickly mimics and shuts off. The sun is setting.

“You,” Mugen always refers to Fuu this way, “Grab a cassette,”

When Fuu had first found Mugen and Jin, she had actually been impressed. She’d never heard beatboxing before. It was pretty new to Japan, and when Mugen got to the actual lyrics, he had the upperhand because he could pronounce more than just Japanese. He switched from English to Portuguese to Korean like an absolute show-off. Jin? Jin would never do anything close to modern music. Dancing was out of the question. But showing off wasn’t. Mugen just happened to switch to Japanese right when he felt like mocking Jin’s samurai shtick and this only served to prove one thing: neither were too proud to stoop to street fighting.

Hazing over the details of their first meeting, Fuu carded through the cassette stash in the glove compartment. Nothing was labeled, of course; Mugen couldn’t have been bothered. So Fuu chose at random. Mugen roughly took it from her hands and stuck in the player himself. He was particular about his radio. It was a new and dodgy installation that he’d done himself. He turned up the dial.

  
_The high plains drifter, and I'm the drifter_  
_They can't catch me they're never gonna find me_  
_They're never gonna know that I'm the high plains drifter_

  
Fuu didn’t understand one lick of the lyrics. She bobbed her head innocently as she watched the sun set. She didn’t know where they were going to sleep that night; hopefully not in the Datsun again. She resisted the urge to count up their yen because she knew there wasn’t much. They’d been on the road two months now and she figured she was lucky they got to shower regularly.

  
_'Cause I'm the high plains drifter_  
_the best that you can get_  
_A strapped shoplifter_  
_a pirate on cassette_

  
The car is tilting. Fuu turns her head to look at Mugen but notices the headlights on the opposite side of the road first. Well, it had been the opposite side of the road.

“Mugen! Watch it!”

He grins, his hands are poised above the wheel, which continues its natural lean towards the right. The other car blares its horn and instead of covering her eyes Fuu surprises herself by reaching for the wheel. Mugen takes it at the last moment. They slide back into the proper lane and Fuu slides as much in the same direction. In the direction of Mugen’s crotch. She hates it when her life turns into some cheesy manga panel.

Mugen laughs—the kind of laughter that’s at her expense. She spits out something fiery—something chipmunky, and pinches her cheeks this time in frustration. She’s nineteen and she wishes she’d act like it.

Fuu turns around to goad Jin into chastising Mugen but he’s still sound asleep. She should have known. The man slept through everything—conveniently every one of her and Mugen’s squabbles.

“Alright, new song,” she said.

“Play that cassette you keep in your bag,”

Fuu stalled, just momentarily. Of course Mugen had noticed the cassette tape.

She wasn’t planning on humoring him, but Fuu took the cassette out all the same. She passed her thumb over the title scratched on the side in permanent marker: ‘The Samurai Who Smells Of Sunflowers.’ Poetic. Sort of described the cassette itself, a strange mix of recorded messages and songs ranging from Elvis Presley to Hako Yamazaki.

“How’d you get this car again?” she asked, changing the subject.

“The old lady died,” Mugen said matter-of-factly. The facts changed every time Fuu asked.

She really didn’t know anything about the men in the car. Jin. Mugen. They didn’t know anything real about her either. They all kept it that way, for some reason. Fuu wasn’t even sure why she did that; she avoided questions, she argued, she wouldn’t share her music with them. Little things like that. She could shower in their proximity, complain to them about her hunger and her period and their habits, but they never got around to things of consequence. Like what they did for fun. Or how they’d all ended up on that same street in Tokyo roughly eight weeks ago, in a perfect sequence of coincidences.

No, Fuu had been on the road with them this long and knew little about them besides what she could parse from their clothes or their speech. Jin obviously came from money—probably old, fallen money, but he still had a history of class wafting off of him like cologne. And Mugen was from Okinawa—a place Fuu knew so little about, aside from the stereotypes. She had an uncle that liked to complain that the Okinawans lived so long because they did so little. But one look at Mugen’s hardened bones and sun scars made her wonder.

There was still so little to go off of.

None of Mugen’s cassette tapes, for example, told Fuu anything either. No way they were all Mugen’s. Half of the music was out-of-fashion pop that Mugen would toss out the window once he found out.

So, without another thought, Fuu placed her cassette in the player. Then she realized that Mugen had let her.

“For Fuu-chan.” It was a man’s voice, an immediate click followed by Elvis Presley’s ‘I Can’t Help Falling In Love.’

“Is that where your old man ran off to?” Mugen asked, after a while, “Hawaii?”

“Maybe,” Fuu said, honestly.

“So where are we heading?” he asked.

“As far from Tokyo as possible, I guess,” said Fuu.

“We’re taking the longest, weirdest way to get there, you know,” Mugen admitted, with his own half-grin.

“Got anything better to do?”

He answered her with a companionable silence. His smile, more like a harsh half-grin, remained. What had brought on that effect? Ah, sharing. Of course. It hadn’t been as hard as Fuu thought. There are still other things she’s too afraid to do. Like kiss Mugen. Yeah, that’d be a bad idea.

He pulled over on the side of the road. They weren’t anywhere near something like a stopping place. Fuu watched as Mugen, never having bothered with a seatbelt in the first place, got out of the car. There was a lightness to his movements, no frantic energy. Fuu looked back at Jin. She just couldn’t decide. Was she feeling some sort of pre-guilt about leaving Jin out of this? Or was she hesitating because she was afraid to be alone with Mugen? She reached out her hand to shake Jin’s shoulder, then stopped.

She found Mugen just a few paces away, and now saw what he had stopped for. There was a haphazard path leading down to a small valley, and in one corner there was a cluster of sunflowers.

“How did you know this was here?”

He didn’t answer her at first. Just stood there with his hands in his pockets. She really wasn’t used to seeing Mugen this still. He reached out a hand and pointed at a small silvery glint.

“See that building there?” he said, now thumbing his nose absently, “That’s a nuke reactor. Used to know a guy who worked there. When I first came to Japan he let me stay the night,”

“In a nuclear reactor?”

“Yeah, you shoulda heard the ghosts,”

Fuu shakes her head, changes the subject, “There’s sunflowers,”

Fuu actually felt _touched_ , but she was pretty sure that wasn’t Mugen’s intention. She kept having a fuzzy thought every time she looked at the flowers and the silver building, and it was when the wind started whistling that it all came together.

“That’s right,” she said, “Sunflowers are supposed to have some kind of cleansing effect on radiation,”

A squirrel scampered past them and Mugen made sure to kick a rock in its direction. Fuu glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Who are you? She’d been asking that since the day they met.

“ _’The samurai who smells of sunflowers,’_ ” Mugen said this in a sing-song voice, “Ha! Maybe your old man’s involved in some nuclear conspiracy,”

“I’m surprised you know what ‘conspiracy’ means,”

He grimaced at her. Then he turned. Fuu hadn’t noticed Jin approaching and she started.

“I swear,” Jin said, adjusting his glasses, “You two are like siblings,”

“Sorry, Jin, didn’t want to interrupt your nap,” Fuu said this quickly. Yep, there was that guilt. What was wrong with having a private moment with Mugen? Why did she feel like when Jin looked at her in that moment, he was looking right through her?

“Fish Face, what do you think?” Mugen asked.

“Hn?”

“I said, what do you think? Her old man might have done dirty by the government, maybe worked in radiation. I mean, she said he was part of the military,”

“I never said that,”

Mugen suddenly looked sheepish. Had he been looking through her things? Did he know something she didn’t know? She shook her head. Whatever. Well, her dad had been involved in the military. But he’d suddenly gone conscientious objector—that’s what her Aunt and Uncle said anyway. But she didn’t want to tell the boys that. She still wasn’t ready to share even half of herself or her family or her real reason for wanting to find her father.

So why did she expect them to give up their secrets?

Why did she expect she could unlock Mugen’s, what, his heart? Did he have one of those? Or that Jin would give her a pat on the head and call her his little sister? Her feelings were so embarrassing.

“Think about it,” Mugen was saying (already he’d lost that calm from a moment before), “’Smells of sunflowers’ is a code name. I bet if we played that tape that Fuu carries around, y’know, like play it backwards, it would reveal some kinda secret message,”

“Really, Mugen,” Fuu rolled her eyes.

“Then tell me where we’re going exactly—anything better than ‘let’s get the hell out of Tokyo,’”

“We’re going to my family’s old beach house, thank you very much!”

The boys looked at her.

Jin finally broke the silence, “So you _do_ have a plan?”

Fuu blushed a little, “Well, yeah,”

“Why have you been so secretive then?” Again, it was Jin who asked. Fuu bit the inside of her cheek.

“She didn’t trust us before,” Mugen said. He looked angry, but Fuu was surprised he even cared what she thought about him.

“What?” she said defensively, “It’s not like I know anything about you guys. I mean, c’mon Mugen, just admit where you really got that Datsun from!”

“You mean admit to grand theft auto? That I knifed some guy or knocked out some old lady and made off with their crap?”

The look he gave her sent chills down her spine. Fuu looked to Jin for back-up, or at least moral support. He looked detached as usual. He never picked sides.

“Look,” Fuu sighed, kicking up dust, “Let’s just drop it,”

“Yeah, let’s just drop it,” Mugen spit something over the ledge. Fuu looked over it.

“Shouldn’t there be a road leading down there?” she asks.  
  
“Huh?”

“Doesn’t anybody work there anymore?”

“No, they shut it down,” said Mugen. There’s an edge of something almost _tender_ in his voice as he says it. Fuu wonders if something had happened to his friend.

She looks at the two boys. Because sometimes they are just that: boys. Other times they’ll be men; they’ll cause her throat to go dry. Jin will remind her of her father. Mugen will remind her she’s a woman.

And she loves them.

She’s suddenly deeply regretful that she had ever left Jin in the car or accused Mugen of being something he wasn’t.

“Guys—” she said.

Before she can say anything, Mugen’s already read her face. He rolls his eyes and bats his hand violently in her direction.

“Ah no, no sentimental apologies, none of that crying in the sunset crap. Just get your ass back in the car,”

Fuu bites the inside of her cheek. It’s starting to feel sore. Then she grins.

“I wanna listen to that song again,” she said.

“Before this is over, I’m gonna make you rap the whole thing,” Mugen grins. They all start walking back to the car.

“Fine, but it’ll sound stupid,” Fuu said, “It’ll be all Engrish. What’s the song about anyway?”

“Pirates,” Mugen said, then grins again, “It’s about me,”

Fuu offers Jin shotgun. It’s like an apology; plus she thinks it’s Mugen and Jin’s turn to argue this time. She’ll sit in the back, content, humming, laughing out loud as Mugen starts to sing along with the song and he sounds so good and so ridiculous, especially ribbing Jin and getting him involved and—this is nice. Having friends is nice. Being in love is nice. Sunsets and sunflowers and old cassette tapes. Fuu thinks this is what heaven will be like—a 1967 Datsun, two guys and a girl, a road that never ends, a sun that never sets.

It’s her turn to drift to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suppose this is in the same universe as "Sweet Release." Been sitting on this story for some time. I'd still like a full-blown 1980s AU--especially with more actual Fuugen, but I think this turned into a little something, so I'm grateful. Plus I always thought this song (High Plains Drifter, Beastie Boys) fit Mugen to a T--because I'm a dork and I spend an inordinate amount of time matching songs to fictional characters. Thanks for reading!


	18. The Eyes Of The Fish Fill With Tears (Spring)

 

> Spring is passing by!  
>  Birds are weeping and the eyes  
>  Of fish fill with tears  
>  -Matsuo Bashō
> 
>  

\--

Jin sat with two cold cups of tea in front of him. On the porcelain, he traced a painted fish with the nail of his little finger.

Shino pulled her cup in front of her and finally drank it to the dregs like it was a much-needed draft of sake. Impressive, considering how bitter the brew was. Jin could see her face at an angle that revealed the new dip underneath her cheekbone, the lack of blood coursing there. What she had told him had not been easy for her to say, but her courage must have increased tenfold since the last time he had seen her; and she’d always been courageous.

She had rejected him.

She had rejected him because he didn’t have a steady income or house ready for her.

She had rejected him because he was an idiot.

He was willing to run halfway across Japan, in the rain and the snow and the blistering sun, and that’d been nothing, through politic upheaval and one or two deaths—but he hadn’t had the foresight to make some sort of life for her. Why shouldn’t she stay within these monastery walls? She was beautiful here, all untouched and clean, and where poverty wasn’t a burden but a choice.

He’d been avoiding looking at her, but now he stole another glance. It hurt; which was why he’d avoided looking at her too directly in the first place.

She was too beautiful to become another poor man’s wife.

—

He hadn’t bothered to count the women he had been with since the last time he’d seen her; none of them had ever counted.

On the last leg of his journey to Hamamatsu, two weeks ago now, he’d gone to his last brothel.

It was only when he returned to his soggy room at the inn that he tried to recall the woman’s fake, perfumed name. See, it hadn’t been real. None of it. Not her pliant breasts or her pliant sighs. None of it had been real. It hadn’t meant anything to him. But he thought about the prostitute all the same. He hadn’t felt this empty in so long.

The last words Shino said to him—”You were always just a boy, weren’t you?”

See, there were two ways to make love.

Well, the first wasn’t making love at all. It was a past time. Every man did it—it was like playing cards, it was like smoking.

The second way to make love was to make it holy.

He’d never feel as holy as when he’d held her in his arms.

And that’s why he thought about the nameless prostitute instead. Because he was a stupid boy who’d had two years to make a woman his, and all he’d done was pass the time.

—

A legend had been circulating Hamamatsu Station for twenty years now. During the spring rains, in the lonely lake fed by the swollen river, a long golden eel was said to slink between the cracks in a thousand-year-old tree that was half-rooted, half-dead in the lake bed.

“The fat old thing’s just waiting to die,” the locals said, “Lived way too long for an eel. In that lonely lake, growing nothing but fat and cumbersome. But no fishermen has ever had the skill,”

Jin didn’t have enough skill to catch a worm for bait.

But he knew that legends were worth their weight in gold.

Or, regardless if Jin really did believe that, he was at least convinced of one thing: catching the bastard would make him feel better about himself.

So, without saying a word to anyone, without even purchasing a fishing pole, without even taking the well-worn path that would have announced he was yet another starry-eyed young man walking up the hill to the lake to catch his fortune, he circumvented his way to the lake shore, sat down on a boulder, and waited.

—

There were actually three variations of the legend.

The first telling swore it was a golden eel that reigned among the underwater roots.

The second said a koi fish heavier than the emperor’s horse and dark as water itself lived in a hole in the trunk.

The third said it was a water dragon, small for its kind, but quick as silver—every gleam in the lake was really just its scales coming to rest at the top of the water. The dragon wrapped itself five times through the roots and around the trunk—small for its kind, indeed.

Jin occupied the lake for ten days before finding out which of the legends was true.

—

It had drizzled the majority of the days he’d camped there. On the ninth night, it finally, properly stormed. It stormed its way straight into dawn, and all the while Jin felt he was snatching at nothing but shadows. He’d been patient for a long time, but now he was desperate. Any movement in the water, the splash of a frog or his own leg, caused his sharp reflexes to act.

He saw every single color in the water—there a flash of scarlet, now a golden reflection, here a streak of silver and green. The lake itself was taunting him. The rain pelting his back and making his long hair an ungainly awkward weight—he’d even lost his glasses in the ordeal but he didn’t care one bit.

If he didn’t catch this thing he was going to throw himself into the lake. Which, incidentally, is what he did next.

His body did it before his mind realized it was a good idea. He vaguely recalled a certain technique he had learned, the movement of one’s hand in line with one’s arm in line with the flow of the water.

The panic melted from Jin as he sunk deeper into the black abyss. He didn’t need to open his eyes. Though his clothes dragged heavily on him, anything felt light as a feather compared to carrying around his daisho all day. It was something he hated about fishing, about any other hobby that didn’t involve swordplay: that sense of nakedness, that lack of a third and fourth limb.

But that hatred, too, melted in the water. In the dark, in the cold, in the absolute reality of drowning, he allowed the weight of Shino’s words to drag him to the bottom. He shrunk into himself. His manhood went small and limp in the frigid lake and he tucked himself into a ball—anything to reach the bottom sooner, to keep blood coursing through his center. Anything to keep this strange cold peace running through him. It had bled through his extremities, then through his frustrated sex (he hadn’t really let himself believe he was capable of sexual frustration), and then through his stomach, that frequently abused thing that had known the sharpness of steel and starvation for too long. And now the cold was reaching his heart, but even then Jin didn’t panic. His feet touched the lake bed. He remained curled up, immobile. He opened his eyes.

It was the ugliest fish he had ever seen. Its scales formed a muddy rainbow, iridescence run down with age, marred by fishing hooks, mixed with silt and clay and sand. It was easy to understand why the legends varied so much in color—depending on the light, the creature might have been any color at all. Those teeth could easily be mistaken for a dragon’s. And the absolute length of the thing did recall an eel. That length was now coiling around Jin, who still remained, small, cold, shriveled. He contemplated the price of Shino’s smooth skin and holy-looking cheekbones, the quality of her voice humming in that throat, hair like a black river. He was already springing into a straight line and placing a hand on either side of a large front tooth as he contemplated the absolute necessity of her friendship—he imagined what they would laugh over, and what meals he would ruin for her, the way she would hang mosquito netting in the summer and create grooves in the garden paths during the spring, the warmth he would give her in the winter and the smell of her in the fall. He was flipping his body around, slowly, dangerously, as his clothes dragged on his ability to spin effectivley in the water, and his feet were landing somewhere near the creature’s eye as he contemplated the names of their children. He was pulling on the obi he had deftly tied around the creature’s tooth when he contemplated what he would do with the money this giant legendary tooth would bring in—he would start a dojo, but do odd jobs on the side, anything, nothing would be beneath him, as long as Shino could wear decent cotton and silk, and collect as many patterned tengui as she wanted, and eat as many baked potatoes and fried eels as her heart desired, and their children could hold their heads up high. He was kicking with all his might to catch a breath at the top of the lake, dragging the tooth behind him when he contemplated that even if he died halfway to that goal, his ghost would come back and watch over her and make sure she never stopped smiling. And, yes, adrenaline heightened the sentimentality of his thoughts, but it did nothing to dampen the sincerity.

Jin was half-heaved onto the lake shore.

It might have been fatigue and oxygen deprivation, but he could have sworn he got a none-too-gentle nudge along the way.

When he regained consciousness, the giant tooth remained tied to his frayed obi, and the surface of the lake was calm.

—

He didn’t make a fuss when he brought her the money, and she didn’t make a fuss when she began to pack. They left the convent when the morning was still cool, the world’s decisions still unmade. That day could have brought anything—there were clouds on the horizon, but the sun was gentle on their backs. The weight of her gaze on him was unmistakable. It made him walk a little taller.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, Jin finally gets his day in the sun. 
> 
> Poem is from: The Narrow Road to Oku, Tokyo, 1996, p. 23 (Translation: Donald Keene).


End file.
